Hiroshima Mon Amour begins with a man and a woman in bed talking. I saw Hiroshima, she says; you saw nothing, he replies. I saw Hiroshima, she repeats, and the camera shows her walking along new Hiroshima streets, strolling through treeless Hiroshima parks, entering the antiseptic New Hiroshima Hotel. You saw nothing.

I saw the museum, the films, the reconstructions, she insists, and as her voice drones on in reiteration, the viewer is exposed to what well may be the ghastliest five minutes ever recorded on commercial film. The scene shifts rapidly from a shot of the Hiroshima museum, to some of the relics of the attack, to graphic sections of film taken in Hiroshima immediately after the bombing. Terrified men and women swim, in flame covered rivers; thousands of people, living and dead, huddle in makeshift hospital-shelters. Director Alain Resnais spares the viewer nothing--the camera methodically records all of the most gruesome effects of immediate radiation burn and lingering radiation sickness, and it is often a few moments before the viewer realizes the full horror of what he has just seen.

When morning arrives the details of the story become clear. A French actress, in Hiroshima for the filming of an anti-war movie has had a casual liaison with a Japanese architect. The architect tries to persuade her to remain in the city for another few days. She refuses, yet he pursues her in a strange and melancholy journey through the city. At one point she begins to tell him of an affair she had had with a German soldier during the war. The soldier was killed by a French sniper and shortly thereafter she went mad. Even at the time of the story, she is slightly mad, retreating into her insanity as she retreats back in her thoughts to the time of the war.

Her affair with the Japanese architect, it turns out, is to a large part, an attempt to re-live her earlier affair, though this point, and its importance in her mental constitution is not realized by the architect himself. Throughout the film there is this sort of vagueness, a lack of complete understanding, as though the shock of the war had left a different imprint upon everyone it touched. The only real point of contact between the French woman and the Japanese architect lies in their hatred of the war, a hatred arising from two completely different ideas of what the war was. Abject terror, however, is the overwhelming constituent of both views, and Hiroshima Mon Amour, is above anything else, an attempt to instill that terror in a populace which has built the new Hiroshima and has forgotten, or never experienced the destruction of the old.

Resnais has not allowed the dominant pacifist theme to obscure the nature of the characters themselves, and he builds the character of the girl with especial care, using a series of deft, slightly uncanny flashbacks. Both of the actors, Emmanuele Riva and Eiji Okada, perform excellently--she with an old woman's weariness--he with a solid diffidence which is never completely penetrated. Both as piece of cinematic fiction and as a document of the war, Hiroshima Mon Amour has outstanding merit. Every-one should see it at least once--more often if at all possible.