Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) /film script by Duras/

Marguerite Duras wrote the film script: Hiroshima Mon Amour in 1959.

     Dealt with memory, space and time, the script is very clever colliding two people as two cities. Centered around the woman's time and space with the present Hiroshima as the background, the pain and trauma caused by the war not only collective but imprinted on each others personal life. However eternity only exists in madness and love only exists in illusion.

     In reality memory is fragile, time is set to temporary hours. No matter how the woman tried to cling onto her love memory, she found herself forget little by little--- " When we'll no more know what thing it is that binds us." The intolerance for her decaying memory perhaps made her hungry for infidelity, adultery, lies and death. The oblivion had turned the lovers into impersonal, collective cities.

     Overall the film is sensual with the shots on hands, naked backs, shoulders and the cheek to cheek talk. The emotion from the story supposedly should be very strong and intense. However the dialogue is set to be remote and distant, only with a sudden burst of emotion. The continuous conversation reminded me of a much recent movie: Before Sunset (2004). Nerveless it's not as complex. Before Sunset only dealt with a simple love story without the war bombing aftermath and the destruction people need to cope with. However the camera movement into the city and the streets, the flow of two people's conversation, are very much alike, smooth like velvet only less twisted.

 More detailed script analysis:     

Duras' "Hiroshima Mon Amour" was one vivid script--- she gave exact details of the film images.

For example: "Ants, worms, emerge from the ground. Interspersed with shots of the shoulders." Or "A cat crossing Peace Square." Probably the only freedom left for the director was choosing between an orange cat from a black one.    

However Resnais has really pulled it. Even with the precise, given "instructions", the whole movie still held onto his visual sensibility. The visual rhythm was undoubtedly Resnais. Probably it's possible only because he still had the freedom to move, tilt or rotate the camera.    

Still, I am surprised to find Resnais follow so strictly to the text, almost 100%. It seems Resnais offered himself to realize Duras' vision into film.    

The script is mainly focusing on the dialogue between two people. One female, one male. One is from Nevers of France, another is from Hiroshima Japan. However the story revealed from the conversation is mostly centered around the French woman, her perspective on Hiroshima and her tragic love experience in Nevers. This approach is probably more sincere for Duras because it will be too much for her to portray an understanding of how the Hiroshima people actually felt. Just like the man (represents Hiroshima) said: "We don't joke about films on Peace."  

The script has five parts.
Part 1 begins with the ambiguous shoulder parts, caressing gestures along with two voices:
  HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.      

  [ To be used as often as desired. A woman's voice, also flat, muffled, monotonous, the voice of someone reciting, replies:]

SHE: I saw everything. Everything.    

Though the man denied the woman's seeing from the beginning, the film images are all about what this French woman, a Caucasian, an outsider, a tourist maybe, what she actually saw in Hiroshima.

Through the documentary footage and public information in the museum exhibition. She said: " . . . . I was under the illusion that I would never forget Hiroshima. Just as in love." But illusion it is. The reality is people forget no matter how painful or how much love, hate, madness involved. Things tend to fade out in time. This is one of the core messages that runs through the script.

Though she would like to have "an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone", like everyone else, she forgets eventually. No matter how hard one grips onto another, they depart into a forgettable blur.  
   
Part 1 is a quick scan on Hiroshima's wound. How deformity and banality had come hand in hand in the city and how the anger for inequality was raised. Along with the fragments of the city, we hear her saying:

  . . . I meet you. I remember you.  Who are you?  You destroy me. You're so good for me. How could I have known that this city was made to the size of love? How could I have known that you were made to the size of my body? You're great. How wonderful. You're great. How slow all of a sudden. And how sweet. More than you can know. You destroy me. You're so good for me. You destroy me. You're so good for me. Plenty of time. Please. Take me. Deform me, make me ugly. Why not you? ........

This kind of short poetic sentences will repeat again in Part 5. There seems to be metaphoric links between body and city, intimate relationship and foreign forces (such as the bomb) . . . . all tangled up in the swirl of love and hate.

However the attitude here is: "I want to be taken and destroyed" (very romantic!). Then we get some information about this two people lying on bed 4'o clock in the morning. Basic "where are you from" casual dialogue. Names of three places appear: Hiroshima, Paris and Nevers.    

Part 2 we have more personal details of them. They both survived the war and were from a city of rivers and both doubtful about morals of other people (thus they were open to affairs?). Then the French woman started to share her memory of her youthful but mad days in Nevers.    

Part 3 sets at an interesting location where the woman is the actress of an international film on Hiroshima. So A film within a film. The man again popped out from nowhere and carried on the conversation with her on Nevers. The essence of time is contrasted here--- when the eternity of madness and the 16 hours to departure were set side by side.    

Part 4 the conversation continued in a cafe where the woman described her forbidden love. She lived in the cellar, mad and full of anger. In the conversation the man now took the role as her German soldier lover. We see in her memory, she linked three places together--- she rode her bicycle from Nevers to Paris and there she saw Hiroshima on newspaper everywhere. The romantic sparks between the two were still active but with a tragic undertone.

He said: "I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness. I'll think of this adventure as of the horror of oblivion." Only another war could bring them to meet again.    

Part 5 shows the woman strolling back and forth in the hotel and later in the streets with her mind in conflicts. Then man magically popped out and joined her, asking her again and again to stay in Hiroshima with him. Then there introduced a new character: another Japanese man in a club called Casablanca (what the ....). This new guy  tried to approach the French woman in English. This scene is kind of awkward for me because Asian men don't normally approach foreign women this way. With her staring into another man, the chatting guy didn't even bothered to stop. That is too weird. Then finally we have the romantic shouting and longing:

SHE: I'll forget you! I'm forgetting you already! Look how I'm forgetting you! Look at me!

[He takes her arms (wrists), she faces him, her head thrown back. She suddenly breaks away from him. He helps her by an effort of self abstraction. As if she were in danger. He looks at her, she at him, as she would look at the city, and suddenly, very softly, she calls him. She calls him from afar, lost in wonder. She has succeeded in drowning him in universal oblivion. And it is a source of amazement to her.]

SHE: Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hi-ro-shi-ma. That's your name ...

HE: That's my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in-France.