Day 283
8 April 2018 01.12am
‘A Startling look at Hiroshima from a French Perspective’ 2018
It’s 15-minutes into Hiroshima mon amour (1959) before the story starts, picking up with a couple in bed together. The man is Japanese and the woman is French. They clearly don’t know each other very well, and the questions they ask of each other underline this. It is the conversation of two people just starting to get to know each other.
It also appears to be a metaphor for something more than that, as the director attempts to begin a conversation between what he is putting on the screen and what he wants the viewer to hear and reflect on. He does it by showing real images, past and present, and narration and conversations between the man and the woman.
That one is Japanese is, of course, important. That the other is French is probably less important. I’m guessing the French person represents anyone in the world who has an ear to hear and eyes to see and a mind to understand the horror of that moment when life in the city of Hiroshima was incinerated.
