Love in Hiroshima

Author: Du
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: A French woman in her early thirties in this city. She is there to participate in filming a peace-themed movie, playing a role in it.The story takes place just before the French woman returns to France. The movie she is in is almost complete, with only one scene left to shoot.Just before she returns to France, the unnamed French woman in the film—the anonymous woman—will meet a Japanese man (engineer or architect), and they will develop a fleeting romance.Marguerite Duras, a French novelist, playwright, and film director, was born in French Indochina and settled in France after the age of eighteen. She gained international acclaim with the films Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and The Song of Kali (1975), and won the Goncourt Prize for Literature in 1984 for her novel The Lover. In the summer of 1957, August, Hiroshima.A French woman in her early thirties in this city. She is there to participate in filming a peace-themed movie, playing a role in it.The story takes place just before the French woman returns to France. The movie she is in is almost complete, with only one scene left to shoot.Just before she returns to France, the unnamed French woman in the film—the anonymous woman—will meet a Japanese man (engineer or architect), and they will develop a fleeting romance.In the film, it is unclear how they meet. Because the issue is not there. All over the world, there are chance encounters. What matters is what happens after these frequent meetings.At the beginning of the film, the audience does not see the couple who meet. They cannot see her. Nor can they see him. What they see are fragmented bodies—parts cut off at the waist—ing—in the flames of desire or in the struggle of the dying—covered in successive layers of ashes, dew, the deathly haze of the atomic bomb, and the sweat of fulfilled desire.Their bodies gradually emerge from these amorphous, hazy forms.They lie together in a hotel room, naked. Their smooth, intact bodies.What are they talking about? They are talking about Hiroshima.She tells him that she saw everything in Hiroshima. The audience sees the scenes she witnessed. These scenes are terrifying. Yet, his opinion is negative, insisting that these scenes are deceptive, and he repeats it objectively and awkwardly that she saw nothing in Hiroshima.Their first conversation is meaningful. In short, it is an operatic-style dialogue. Talking about Hiroshima is impossible. What one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The understanding of Hiroshima is presented as a kind of mental hallucination at the beginning of the film.This beginning, this series of official commemorative events for the tragedy in Hiroshima, recalled on a hotel bed, this profane remembrance, is all deliberately arranged. People can talk about Hiroshima everywhere, even between a man and a woman who meet by chance and fall in love, on the bed where they have a secret affair. The bodies of the two main characters who are truly in love in the film remind us of this. If there is any profanation, the true profanation is Hiroshima itself. There is no need for hypocrisy or to avoid the essence of the issue.