Hiroshima Mon Amour

In watching Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour in class, I could not help trying to remember my first viewing experience with it. I had rented it at Amazon.com’s suggestion because I own Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, a film about an affair between two married people in 1960s Hong Kong. I remember that Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman and a Japanese man having a brief affair in Hiroshima, Japan. I also remember the French woman telling the Japanese man about her affair with a German soldier. But I forgot the sudden, sharp emotional outbursts by the French woman as she starts to juxtapose the Japanese man with her deceased German lover. My forgetting of her outbursts made that part of the film feel like my first time seeing it allowing me to have the visceral reaction of wanting to give her a Xanax or Prozac. If I had remembered her outbursts, I might have felt a little more sympathetic. She is recalling a personal traumatic experience for the first time. She forgot how truly traumatic it was to lose her German lover and to suffer the consequences. The fact that Germany and Japan were allies in World War II obviously facilitated the juxtaposition of the two men. In her forgetting the trauma, she could only react with abrupt emotions because it feels like she is experiencing the trauma for the first time.

As I mentioned before, I saw this film because I love In the Mood for Love but Hiroshima, Mon Amour seems more like Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 in its treatment of place and the past. In 2046, Chow Mo-wan is pre-occupied by the memory of his past affair with Su Li-zhen. 2046 is Chow’s Nevers because it is the hotel room number where they would meet to write a martial arts novel. Unlike the French woman, Chow revisits the past often through his novels in which his main character goes to a place called 2046 to recover the past. As Hiroshima is a place of a significant historical event, 2046 is also the last year that Hong Kong will be free of China’s interference in their economy and politics. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Hiroshima serves as a background to highlight consequences of remembering and forgetting trauma. In 2046, the year serves as a subtext for inability to move on as Chow cannot move on from his past affair despite having multiple lovers. Also, Chow has a similar scene in which he recounts his affair to someone. In his case, the woman has the same name, so he tries to recreate the feelings he had for Su with this woman. In comparing the two films, I can see how influential Hiroshima, Mon Amour is in its portrayal of remembering.