**
DVD Release
Fifteen years after the atomic
bomb obliterated Hiroshima, a young actress visits the city and embarks on a
short term love affair with a native man. Over the course of twenty four hours,
the pair explore the city and one another.
The film begins with an image of
two bodies entwined in a sexual embrace, although we cannot see their faces.
Inbetween these erotic images, the film adopts a documentary-style narrative,
with a female voice describing Hiroshima today. We see scenes of a museum with
relics from August 6th 1945, as well as montages of people with
radiation poisoning and children born incredibly deformed. This opening twenty
or so minutes is the most interesting, if very morbid, part of the film which
soon deteriorates into the a truly bizarre and cringe-inducing romance between
two unnamed characters. The female character (Emmanuelle Riva) is in Hiroshima
to film an ‘international peace film’ when she meets her lover (Eiji Odaka) and
they engage in a very intense, highly sexual, relationship which sees them
stalk each other around the city and have long, philosophical debates about
memory and oblivion.
This could have been an interesting
study into loss and personal memory, but the two main characters are so
desperately annoying that it is impossible to really care. The female character
is so overtly dramatic and indecisive that you long to reach through the screen
and shake her, whereas the man is so stalker-ish that you long for someone to
issue him with a restraining order. The emotional stakes are placed so high
that they become impossibly fake, with the woman demonstrating severe
psychological troubles by jumping from happiness to complete despair in the
space of a sentence.
The strongest sections of the
film are when the director allows the audience to remember World War Two and
the suffering that happened around the world. In a particularly poignant scene,
we see how the woman’s home town of Nevers was occupied by German forces and
became a tool in Hitler’s empire. There is also a peace march against the
development of further nuclear weapons which features some very moving slogans,
but these are all side-lined against the incredibly infuriating relationship
between two distinctly frustrating characters.
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