Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) on Netflix
In Hiroshima to make an anti-war film, a French actress begins an affair with a Japanese architect. Both are married, and she is due to fly home to Paris the next day.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.8/1039,880 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
A Japanese architect meets a French actress in a café in Hiroshima, where she is in town to shoot an anti-war film. Over a day and a night the two talk about the city, the war and their marriages. He is from Hiroshima, and the bombing killed his family while he was serving in the Pacific. She speaks of Nevers, her hometown, where she loved a German soldier during the occupation, and of how little she wants to go back there. She has a flight to Paris the next morning, and though the architect wants to see her again, she will not arrange another meeting. He turns up at the set where she is filming.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Alain Resnais was commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb but spent months unsure how to proceed because he did not want to repeat his 1956 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He joked to his producer that the film could not be made unless Marguerite Duras wrote it.
- At the 1959 Cannes Film Festival the film won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Prize, but it was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear bombs and to avoid upsetting the U.S. government.
- The uncensored version was shown at the Montreal International Film Festival in 1960, but the film was censored for its Canadian theatrical release.
- Though the film's French scenes were shot in Nevers, several scenes from the film that are located in Nevers were in fact filmed in Autun.
- Resnais intercut very brief flashback sequences into scenes to suggest a brief flash of memory, an innovation he later reused in Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and The War Is Over (1966).
