(1959, b/w; French, Japanese, English) A memory is not to forget, but already it is forgotten, though by necessity there is "reason to remember." In a hotel room in Hiroshima in the arms of a Japanese man (Eiji Okada), a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) speaks of having seen the hospital, the museum (four times, with its reproductions on film and exhibits of twisted metal), just afterward the newsreels, and "I saw the survivors too," fourteen years after the atomic bomb. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima," he (who had been a 22-year-old soldier at that time during the war) repeatedly says (though his family had been there).

The horrors were not unlike the Holocaust in Europe. She is an actress (wearing the uniform of a nurse) on location, acting in an international film about peace; he is an architect fluent in French (though how he learned the language is not explained). "You made it all up," he says.

They met in a café on the night before she was to return to France and part at the Casablanca bar. She refuses the possibility of ever seeing him again, though he begs her to reconsider. They say they are happily married. "You're destroying me," she of "dubious morals" says: "You're good for me."

Director Alain Resnais's internationally influential film, from Marguerite Duras's poignant, unsettling screenplay, weaves together past and present love affairs/fears of another nuclear nightmare. Books, documentaries, anniversaries, monuments, the various reconstructions of the past to remind us never to forget ("never again") fade in the public consciousness, making the unthinkable tragically possible again.

She is hungry for adultery, lies, death. Twenty at the time of the blast, she tells him of her astonishment at the audacious act, then rejoiced in the certainty of a complete end to the war; but then came the indifference. "A single death is a tragedy," said Joseph Stalin, "a million deaths is a statistic."

Madness, she tries to explain, is like intelligence; and she became mad with hate. An anti-nuclear-arms protest march displays a banner proclaiming that political intelligence is 100 times less than that of science.

During a conversation in a tea room, he chooses to put her back in Nevers, where she was born and raised, in asking her about being there during the war; she then, remembering being eighteen ("I was so young once"), puts him into the soul of her first love, a dead German soldier, with whom she disgraced herself and her family. Confined to a cellar for screaming, her hair shorn, "too busy suffering to care," she eventually became reasonable again (after the world had gone mad), turned twenty, and rode her bicycle to Paris.

Elated with her saying she has never revealed this story of hers to anyone else, not even to her husband, the architect acknowledges the "horror of forgetting." To the memory of her soldier she confesses: "Look how I'm forgetting you. Look how I've forgotten you."

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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