Hiroshima mon amour (French pronunciation:[iʁoʃimamɔ̃n‿amuʁ], lit.Hiroshima, My Love,Japanese:二十四時間の情事,romanized: Nijūyojikan no jōji,lit. 'Twenty-four hour love affair') is a 1959romanticdrama film directed by French directorAlain Resnais and written by French authorMarguerite Duras.

Hiroshima mon amour
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Alain Resnais
Written by	Marguerite Duras
Produced by	Samy Halfon Anatole Dauman
Starring	Emmanuelle Riva Eiji Okada
Cinematography	Sacha Vierny Michio Takahashi
Edited by	Henri Colpi Jasmine Chasney Anne Sarraute
Music by	Georges Delerue Giovanni Fusco
Production companies	Argos Films Como Films Daiei Pathé Overseas Productions
Distributed by	Cocinor (France) Daiei (Japan)
Release dates	8 May 1959 (1959-05-08) (Cannes) 10 June 1959 (1959-06-10) (France) 20 June 1959 (1959-06-20) (Japan)
Running time	90 minutes
Countries	France Japan
Languages	French Japanese

Resnais' first feature-length work, it was a co-production between France and Japan, and documents a series of intensely personal conversations (or one long conversation) over slightly more than a 24-hour period between an unnamed French actress and a Japanese architect. The film is notable for Resnais' innovative use of briefflashbacks to suggest flashes of memory, which create anonlinear storyline.

Along with films such asBreathless (1960) andThe 400 Blows (1959),Hiroshima mon amour brought international attention to the new movement in French cinema and is widely considered to be one of the most influential films of theFrench New Wave. In particular, it was a major catalyst forLeft Bank Cinema.

A series ofcloseups of the backs and arms of a man and woman embracing, amidst falling ash and then covered in sweat. Invoiceover, the woman recounts the aftermath of theatomic bombing of Hiroshima that she has seen on her trip to the city, whilenewsreel and fictional footage of victims, protests, war memorials, and the streets and buildings of modernHiroshima are shown. The man calmly says the woman has not seen anything, nor does she know what it is to forget. He is from Hiroshima and his family died in the bombing while he was off fighting inthe war, and the woman is a French actress who is in the city to make an anti-war film.

In the morning, the woman watches the man sleep. His twitching hand reminds her of her first love, a soldier whose hand moved similarly as he lay dying. The Japanese man wakes, and it becomes clear he and the woman met the previous night at a café. She learns he is an architect who is involved in politics. They discuss the bombing and the end of the war, and he is enchanted by the word "Nevers", her hometown, to which she never wants to return. The man says he would like to see the woman again, but she says she is flying back toParis the next day. Neither this nor the revelation that she has children change how he feels, but she, though torn, repeatedly declines to arrange another meeting.

The man visits the woman at thefilming location, and she is happy to see him. He takes her back to his house. She asks if he lives alone, and he replies that his wife is out of town for a few days. They both say they are happy in their marriages, though they have had casual affairs before, and make love again. After deciding to spend the woman's remaining time in Hiroshima together, they go to atea room, where the man asks the woman to tell him more about Nevers and her life there. Intercut with flashbacks, she tells how she and anoccupying German soldier fell in love and planned to elope toBavaria before he was shot while waiting for her on the day Nevers wasliberated, how she stayed with him while he died over the next two days, how the villagers shaved her head when they found out about the relationship, and how her parents locked her alternately in her room and the cellar while her hair grew out and she came out of her madness and then sent her away to Paris just before Hiroshima was bombed. She tries to convey the pain she feels about forgetting the German and their love, and indicates she has been trying to keep her distance from the Japanese man because she does not want any more such heartbreak.

The man is elated when he learns the woman never told her husband about the German, but when they leave the tea room, she tells him to go away and that they will probably never see each other again. In her hotel room, she feels guilty about telling the man about the German, but decides to stay in Hiroshima. She goes back to the now-closed tea room, and the man finds her and asks her to stay. She weakly says she will, but then tells him again to go away. They walk around the city, together and separately, images of Hiroshima alternating with images of Nevers. The woman goes to a train station, where she lets go of some of her issues surrounding her first love and decides she might like to visit Nevers. She takes a cab to a nightclub, the man following. The place is nearly empty and they sit apart. As the sun rises, a Japanese man sits by the woman and hits on her in English.

Back in the woman's hotel room, the architect knocks at the door. She lets him in and yells that she is already starting to forget him, but abruptly calms and says his name is "Hiroshima". He responds that it is, and her name is "Nevers".

• Emmanuelle Riva as Elle ("Her")
• Eiji Okada as Lui ("Him")
• Bernard Fresson as l'Allemand ("The German")
• Stella Dassas as la mère ("The Mother")
• Pierre Barbaud as le père ("The Father")

In 1954, while Alain Resnais was editingAgnès Varda's filmLa Pointe Courte, he was reluctant to work on it because it was "so nearly the film he wanted to make himself". The film's narrative structure inspiredHiroshima mon amour.^[1]

According toJames Monaco, Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about theatomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1956Holocaust documentaryNight and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unlessMarguerite Duras was involved in writing the screenplay.^[2]

The film was a co-production by companies from both France and Japan. The producers stipulated that one main character must be French and the other Japanese, and also required that the film be shot in both countries employing film crews comprising technicians from each.^[2]

The French scenes were shot in Nevers.^[3] However, several scenes from the film located in Nevers were, in fact, filmed inAutun.^[4]

Among the film's innovations is the way Resnais intercut very brief flashback sequences into scenes to suggest a brief flash of memory. He later used a similar effect inLast Year at Marienbad (1961) andThe War Is Over (1966).

The uncensored version of the film was shown at theMontreal International Film Festival in 1960, but was censored for its Canadian theatrical release.^[5]

At the1959 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was excluded from the official selection because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear bombs and to avoid upsetting the U.S. government,^[6] the film won theFIPRESCI International Critics' Prize,^[7] and it won the prestigiousGrand Prix from theBelgian Film Critics Association in 1960.^[8] For her work on the film, screenwriterMarguerite Duras was nominated for the award forBest Original Screenplay at the33rd Academy Awards. In 2002, the film was voted by the international contributors of the French film magazinePositif to be one of the top 10 films since 1952, when the magazine was founded.

Hiroshima mon amour has been described as "The Birth of a Nation of theFrench New Wave" by American criticLeonard Maltin.^[9] New Wave filmmakerJean-Luc Godard described its inventiveness as "Faulkner plusStravinsky" and celebrated the film's originality, calling it "the first film without any cinematic references".^[10] FilmmakerEric Rohmer said: "I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty, or thirty years, we will know whetherHiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema".^[11]

The film was shown as part of the Cannes Classics section of the2013 Cannes Film Festival^[12] and was screened nine times at theHarvard Film Archive between 28 November and 13 December 2014.^[13]

The film holds a rating of 96% from 47 reviews onRotten Tomatoes with the consensus: "Distinguished by innovative technique and Emmanuelle Riva's arresting performance,Hiroshima Mon Amour is a poignant love story as well as a thoughtful meditation on international trauma."^[14]

• In 2001,Japanesefilm directorNobuhiro Suwa directedH Story, adocufiction about his attempt to remakeHiroshima Mon Amour.^[15]
• In 2003,Iranian film director Bahman Pour-Azar releasedWhere or When. The 85-minute film places Pour-Azar's characters in the same circumstances as Resnais's nearly a half century later. However, the current global tension of today's world is the backdrop instead of post-war Hiroshima. When screening the film, Stuart Alson, who founded the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, said the piece was "a parallel line of work with the French masterpieceHiroshima mon amour".^[16]

• List of avant-garde films of the 1950s

• Spencer, Michael (2003).Hollywood North: Creating the Canadian Motion Picture Industry. Cantos International Publishing.ISBN 289594007X.

• Hiroshima mon amour atIMDb  
• Hiroshima mon amour atRotten Tomatoes 
• Hiroshima mon amour at theTCM Movie Database 
• Hiroshima mon amour: Time Indefinite – an essay by Kent Jones atThe Criterion Collection