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Daisyread's Reviews > Hiroshima mon amour
Hiroshima mon amour
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Two expressions popped up in my mind as I read the screenplay.
¡°Æ¼Ë®Ïà·ê¡± and ¡° åâåË¡±.
Both expressions/ words are so frequently used in the Chinese language that, I am afraid, much of the romance and drama contained in them have been lost when they are casually uttered.
¡°Æ¼Ë®Ïà·ê¡± , to translate literally, means the the encounter of ( two) drifting duckweeds; while åâåË can be translated as ¡° chance encounter ¡°, there is a touch of romance as well as a sense of excitement brought out by the boundless possibilities of this encounter hinted by this word that cannot be fully conveyed by its translation of ¡° chance encounter ¡°.
Although, ¡° chance encounter ¡° itself , to me, is already an expression full of drama.
¡°Chance meetings occur everywhere in the world. What is important is what these ordinary meetings lead to.¡±(p.8)
This is a story of a chance encounter.
Two rootless duckweeds, nameless, ravaged by war and destruction, collide into one another. Blinding sparkles and scorching flames ensue.
But this is so much more than a story of a mere chance encounter.
It¡¯s also a story of the complex nature of love, of memory and forgetting, and of the horror of war examined through love.
Our unnamed protagonist, a French woman, goes to Hiroshima for a movie on peace that she plays a role in.
Shortly before she is supposed to leave, she meets a Japanese architect and they have a both physically and emotionally intense affair.
Through their conversations, the traumatic events that happened to the French woman during the war are revealed.
All my friends in real life know that I don¡¯t believe in love at first sight. I have been a believer of the testament of time.
However, this book/movie makes me think maybe profound connections can in fact be established from a short but intense encounter.
Maybe after much suffering and trauma, one carries around with oneself an aura, something like glints from shattered glasses, that attracts the ones who recognize and understand.
The Japanese architect¡¯s family was in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped, the French woman lost her first love right before the end of the war in Nevers. They see each other, and recognize each other.
¡°±á±ð:
Have you ever noticed that it¡¯s always in the same sense that people notice things?¡±
³§³ó±ð£º
No.I noticed you, that¡¯s all.¡±(p.33)
Or maybe, a location, such as Hiroshima, one that¡¯s once completely annihilated, is conducive to such love affairs. A place where death has been preserved. It reminds one of the end of the world, where a kind of desperate yet powerful passion can sprout, much like the ¡° the new vegetation rising from the sands¡± with vitality that¡¯d never been seen before during the nuclear fallout in Hiroshima.
¡°How could I have known that the city was made to the size of love?¡±
How could I have known that you were made to the size of my body?¡± (p.25)
¡°their embrace-so banal, so commonplace-takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it: Hiroshima.
Nothing is "given" at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning.¡±
But to ponder on the nature of a passionate love affair is only to scratch the surface of this screenplay / movie.
Through their dialogues, you get a sense that the French woman is torn between the desire to remember and the desire to etch the memories in her soul. She is simultaneously fighting both desires.
¡°You see, Nevers is the city in the world, and even the thing in the world, I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it¡¯s the thing I think about the least.¡± (p.37)
I think anyone who has been through grief and loss can relate to such conflicting emotions.
To forget is to betray.
To remember is to relive the pain.
It seems that, when one¡¯s fighting against the past, there is no way to win.
And what can cause more grief and loss than a war ?
The war has ended but the fight with the past has not.
Nevers, France. Hiroshima, Japan. Two places grieving. Two places, all at once, struggling to remember and forget with all their might.
This struggle with memory intertwines with the love affair, intensifies it, dooms it and sublimates it.
What will never cease to touch me is the following conversation between them:
¡°She ( Calmly): Why talk of him rather than the others?
He: Why not?
She: No. Why?
He: Because of Nevers. I can only begin to know you, and among many thousands of things in your life, I am choosing Nevers.¡±(p.51)
Memories shape a person, and sometimes it¡¯s all we have and all we are. However we try, we can not escape from ourselves.
The Japanese man understands this. While he tries to reach towards the very core of her being, he needs to see Nevers. Nevers, the place that bears insufferable pain for the French woman, the place that she dreams about every day but does not dare to speak of, defines her.
¡°±á±ð: It was there, I seem to have understood, that I almost¡lost you¡and that I rushed ever knowing you¡¡±
He: It was there, I seem to have understood, that you must have begun to be what you are today.¡± (p51)
He is the person who sees her for her memories, for her traumas, her madness and her anger.
Yet, She recognizes this love is hopeless. Just like her love in Nevers.
¡° A hopeless love, killed like the Nevers love. Therefore already relegated to oblivion. Therefore eternal.¡± (p.12)
But, unlike the love in Nevers that leaves only scars, I would like to think their love, both short-lived and eternal, also hints at something hopeful. Through this affair, they have faced the past, and maybe they can now start healing.
The first 15 minutes of the movie might be one of the greatest opening scenes of all the movies I have seen.
I think the director Alain Resnais has shown what Duras tries to convey through her play very faithfully.
We have two naked bodies, interlocking but also pushing against one another. They are sweaty with desire, and seemingly covered with dust, evocative of the aftermath of a nuclear fallout. Then we get the dialogue of the woman and all that she says she saw in Hiroshima,
Juxtaposed with the erotism are the horrifying images of the nuclear fallout. The result is shocking, disquieting and sacrilegious.
The woman insists that she saw everything in Hiroshima, while the man dispassionately replies ¡°No, you saw nothing¡±.
For this Duras provides a perfect explanation:
¡°Thus their initial exchange is allegorical. In short, an operatic exchange. Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima being stated ¨¤ priori by an exemplary delusion of the mind.
This beginning, this official parade of already well-known horrors from Hiroshima, recalled in a hotel bed, this sacrilegious recollection, is voluntary. One can talk about Hiroshima anywhere, even in a hotel bed, during a chance, an adulterous love affair. The bodies of both protagonists, who are really in love with each other, will remind us of this. What is really sacrilegious, if anything is, is Hiroshima itself. There's no point in being hypocritical and avoiding the issue.¡± (p.9)
This reminded me of the time when I was at a dinner party and the topic of the conversation moved to wars, and everyone¡¯s face sank with a mournful expression and soon we all fell silent¡someone, timely, cracked a silly joke and the party spirit was revived. The entire night seemed so surreal everytime I thought about it.
This also reminded me of the French woman¡¯s response to the Japanese man, when asked what Hiroshima meant for her.
She says ¡° The end of war, I mean, the end. Amazement¡ at the idea that they had dared¡amazement at the idea that they had succeeded. And then too, for us, the beginning of an unknown fear. And then, indifference. And also the fear of indifference.¡±
The shadows of war can be seen everywhere in this movie and in the screenplay. The images of the nuclear fallout, the parades for peace with anti-war posters, the reason why the woman was in Hiroshima in the first place was because she was acting in a movie about peace ( isn¡¯t any movie about peace also about war?)
But first and foremost, the horror of war is seen through love and memories.
Through their collective trauma from war, the Japanese man and the French woman notice, see and understand each other. Without the horrors of the war, their love would be impossible.
But it is also examined through the memories of the woman and her struggle with those memories.
At the beginning of the play, the French woman says ¡° I¡¯ve always wept over the fate of Hiroshima. Always.¡±
There might be an element of the superficial sadness that tourists experience, but the brutal reality of her fate might convince the readers/viewers otherwise.
She might have not seen everything, but in a sense, she also did see everything. That ¡°everything¡± she saw is the endless horror of war and the torment that war can impose on each individual who goes through it.
¡°³§³ó±ð:±á¾±-°ù´Ç-²õ³ó¾±-³¾²¹.
Hi¨Cro-shi-ma. That¡¯s your name.
He: That¡¯s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in France.¡±
I couldn¡¯t stop thinking about the movie after I saw it earlier this week.
And I thought about it some more after I read the screenplay.
The movie is highly faithful to the play with some minor changes. I highly recommend watching the movie and reading the play.
¡°Æ¼Ë®Ïà·ê¡± and ¡° åâåË¡±.
Both expressions/ words are so frequently used in the Chinese language that, I am afraid, much of the romance and drama contained in them have been lost when they are casually uttered.
¡°Æ¼Ë®Ïà·ê¡± , to translate literally, means the the encounter of ( two) drifting duckweeds; while åâåË can be translated as ¡° chance encounter ¡°, there is a touch of romance as well as a sense of excitement brought out by the boundless possibilities of this encounter hinted by this word that cannot be fully conveyed by its translation of ¡° chance encounter ¡°.
Although, ¡° chance encounter ¡° itself , to me, is already an expression full of drama.
¡°Chance meetings occur everywhere in the world. What is important is what these ordinary meetings lead to.¡±(p.8)
This is a story of a chance encounter.
Two rootless duckweeds, nameless, ravaged by war and destruction, collide into one another. Blinding sparkles and scorching flames ensue.
But this is so much more than a story of a mere chance encounter.
It¡¯s also a story of the complex nature of love, of memory and forgetting, and of the horror of war examined through love.
Our unnamed protagonist, a French woman, goes to Hiroshima for a movie on peace that she plays a role in.
Shortly before she is supposed to leave, she meets a Japanese architect and they have a both physically and emotionally intense affair.
Through their conversations, the traumatic events that happened to the French woman during the war are revealed.
All my friends in real life know that I don¡¯t believe in love at first sight. I have been a believer of the testament of time.
However, this book/movie makes me think maybe profound connections can in fact be established from a short but intense encounter.
Maybe after much suffering and trauma, one carries around with oneself an aura, something like glints from shattered glasses, that attracts the ones who recognize and understand.
The Japanese architect¡¯s family was in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped, the French woman lost her first love right before the end of the war in Nevers. They see each other, and recognize each other.
¡°±á±ð:
Have you ever noticed that it¡¯s always in the same sense that people notice things?¡±
³§³ó±ð£º
No.I noticed you, that¡¯s all.¡±(p.33)
Or maybe, a location, such as Hiroshima, one that¡¯s once completely annihilated, is conducive to such love affairs. A place where death has been preserved. It reminds one of the end of the world, where a kind of desperate yet powerful passion can sprout, much like the ¡° the new vegetation rising from the sands¡± with vitality that¡¯d never been seen before during the nuclear fallout in Hiroshima.
¡°How could I have known that the city was made to the size of love?¡±
How could I have known that you were made to the size of my body?¡± (p.25)
¡°their embrace-so banal, so commonplace-takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it: Hiroshima.
Nothing is "given" at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning.¡±
But to ponder on the nature of a passionate love affair is only to scratch the surface of this screenplay / movie.
Through their dialogues, you get a sense that the French woman is torn between the desire to remember and the desire to etch the memories in her soul. She is simultaneously fighting both desires.
¡°You see, Nevers is the city in the world, and even the thing in the world, I dream about most often at night. And at the same time it¡¯s the thing I think about the least.¡± (p.37)
I think anyone who has been through grief and loss can relate to such conflicting emotions.
To forget is to betray.
To remember is to relive the pain.
It seems that, when one¡¯s fighting against the past, there is no way to win.
And what can cause more grief and loss than a war ?
The war has ended but the fight with the past has not.
Nevers, France. Hiroshima, Japan. Two places grieving. Two places, all at once, struggling to remember and forget with all their might.
This struggle with memory intertwines with the love affair, intensifies it, dooms it and sublimates it.
What will never cease to touch me is the following conversation between them:
¡°She ( Calmly): Why talk of him rather than the others?
He: Why not?
She: No. Why?
He: Because of Nevers. I can only begin to know you, and among many thousands of things in your life, I am choosing Nevers.¡±(p.51)
Memories shape a person, and sometimes it¡¯s all we have and all we are. However we try, we can not escape from ourselves.
The Japanese man understands this. While he tries to reach towards the very core of her being, he needs to see Nevers. Nevers, the place that bears insufferable pain for the French woman, the place that she dreams about every day but does not dare to speak of, defines her.
¡°±á±ð: It was there, I seem to have understood, that I almost¡lost you¡and that I rushed ever knowing you¡¡±
He: It was there, I seem to have understood, that you must have begun to be what you are today.¡± (p51)
He is the person who sees her for her memories, for her traumas, her madness and her anger.
Yet, She recognizes this love is hopeless. Just like her love in Nevers.
¡° A hopeless love, killed like the Nevers love. Therefore already relegated to oblivion. Therefore eternal.¡± (p.12)
But, unlike the love in Nevers that leaves only scars, I would like to think their love, both short-lived and eternal, also hints at something hopeful. Through this affair, they have faced the past, and maybe they can now start healing.
The first 15 minutes of the movie might be one of the greatest opening scenes of all the movies I have seen.
I think the director Alain Resnais has shown what Duras tries to convey through her play very faithfully.
We have two naked bodies, interlocking but also pushing against one another. They are sweaty with desire, and seemingly covered with dust, evocative of the aftermath of a nuclear fallout. Then we get the dialogue of the woman and all that she says she saw in Hiroshima,
Juxtaposed with the erotism are the horrifying images of the nuclear fallout. The result is shocking, disquieting and sacrilegious.
The woman insists that she saw everything in Hiroshima, while the man dispassionately replies ¡°No, you saw nothing¡±.
For this Duras provides a perfect explanation:
¡°Thus their initial exchange is allegorical. In short, an operatic exchange. Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima being stated ¨¤ priori by an exemplary delusion of the mind.
This beginning, this official parade of already well-known horrors from Hiroshima, recalled in a hotel bed, this sacrilegious recollection, is voluntary. One can talk about Hiroshima anywhere, even in a hotel bed, during a chance, an adulterous love affair. The bodies of both protagonists, who are really in love with each other, will remind us of this. What is really sacrilegious, if anything is, is Hiroshima itself. There's no point in being hypocritical and avoiding the issue.¡± (p.9)
This reminded me of the time when I was at a dinner party and the topic of the conversation moved to wars, and everyone¡¯s face sank with a mournful expression and soon we all fell silent¡someone, timely, cracked a silly joke and the party spirit was revived. The entire night seemed so surreal everytime I thought about it.
This also reminded me of the French woman¡¯s response to the Japanese man, when asked what Hiroshima meant for her.
She says ¡° The end of war, I mean, the end. Amazement¡ at the idea that they had dared¡amazement at the idea that they had succeeded. And then too, for us, the beginning of an unknown fear. And then, indifference. And also the fear of indifference.¡±
The shadows of war can be seen everywhere in this movie and in the screenplay. The images of the nuclear fallout, the parades for peace with anti-war posters, the reason why the woman was in Hiroshima in the first place was because she was acting in a movie about peace ( isn¡¯t any movie about peace also about war?)
But first and foremost, the horror of war is seen through love and memories.
Through their collective trauma from war, the Japanese man and the French woman notice, see and understand each other. Without the horrors of the war, their love would be impossible.
But it is also examined through the memories of the woman and her struggle with those memories.
At the beginning of the play, the French woman says ¡° I¡¯ve always wept over the fate of Hiroshima. Always.¡±
There might be an element of the superficial sadness that tourists experience, but the brutal reality of her fate might convince the readers/viewers otherwise.
She might have not seen everything, but in a sense, she also did see everything. That ¡°everything¡± she saw is the endless horror of war and the torment that war can impose on each individual who goes through it.
¡°³§³ó±ð:±á¾±-°ù´Ç-²õ³ó¾±-³¾²¹.
Hi¨Cro-shi-ma. That¡¯s your name.
He: That¡¯s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers-in France.¡±
I couldn¡¯t stop thinking about the movie after I saw it earlier this week.
And I thought about it some more after I read the screenplay.
The movie is highly faithful to the play with some minor changes. I highly recommend watching the movie and reading the play.
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Nick
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Mar 23, 2024 01:41PM
It's an interesting idea to ponder, Daisy, how a brief encounter matters over time. Without maintenance and experience it likely gets trapped like a memory in its moment, never growing or changing with the changes around. Though its significance continues, regardless. It needs its own nature metaphor like the chance encounter of duckweeds. I like that by the way, forcing me to visualise plants drifting on the water and merging.
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Nick wrote: "It's an interesting idea to ponder, Daisy, how a brief encounter matters over time. Without maintenance and experience it likely gets trapped like a memory in its moment, never growing or changing ...""Without maintenance and experience it likely gets trapped like a memory in its moment, never growing or changing with the changes around. Though its significance continues, regardless." i could not have said it better myself Nick, I think this is what Duras was trying to say as well, when she wrote "A hopeless love, killed like the Nevers love. Therefore already relegated to oblivion. Therefore eternal." and also, I think, one of the reasons why the French woman chooese not to stay, so that this love can be eternalized in memory.
I am glad you like the imagery, me as well.
A lof of Chinese idioms are from classcial poems, in this case, it is from Wang Wei.
Chinese is my first language, but since I have been reading and speaking mostly in English for years, I do feel a certain distance to my native language now. And that distance, somehow allows me to see the beauty of overwise overused and mundane expressions :)
Daisyread wrote: "And that distance, somehow allows me to see the beauty of overwise overused and mundane expressions.."That's a very interesting observation about how you see certain well used expressions.
The image of the duckweed made me think of how denatured the world has become. How much observation it takes to see what is in nature, and how little opportunity there is to see it on a day to day basis.
That observation is also true when I read in English, certain expressions or metaphors might seem mundane to people who speak it as their first language, but I still find them exciting :)It is so true, one thing that I love about Classical Chinese poetry is that how it relies on the imageries to evoke a certain feeling¡eg, duckweeds implies a sense of loneliness and helplessness whenever mentioned. It takes a great poet to make that happen.
With so much time spent indoor there is indeed few opportunities¡and when people are out, sometimes it seems that most of them are not paying attention, which is a shame really. It¡¯s the cherry blossom season here and it¡¯s glorious, but it¡¯s astonishing to see how many people pass the trees by in a hurry without giving them a single glance.
Every fortnight I have a Greek conversation night with a woman whose father was Greek but she never spoke Greek at home. He was only really Greek because he lived much of his life on an island but was in reality from Eastern Europe there as a kind of refugeeAnyway she has been learning Greek for years but never speaking it
I find myself going over many of the basic routine and ordinary expressions I grew up with realising that those expressions essentially make up cultural life because everyone knows them intimately. And needs them to get by - it¡¯s like they become absorbed unconsciously and never thought of. But they are unknown to a non native speaker.
Nick wrote: "Every fortnight I have a Greek conversation night with a woman whose father was Greek but she never spoke Greek at home. He was only really Greek because he lived much of his life on an island but ...""In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. I find myself going over many of the basic routine and ordinary expressions I grew up with realising that those expressions essentially make up cultural life because everyone knows them intimately. And needs them to get by - it¡¯s like they become absorbed unconsciously and never thought of. But they are unknown to a non native speaker."
Very true! I hope the lady's Greek has improved with your help!
Is Greek you first language Nick?:) I love the sound of Greek even though I understand no single word of it.
We visited Greece a few years ago, we loved it so much that we are going back for a trip later this year.
This discussion about language somehow reminds me of this bit in Woolf's essay On Being Ill:
"But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarm¨¦ or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour. Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage. "
I thought this was brilliant when I read it.
Sort of is my first language, in the sense that most children of immigrants grow up outside the main language and only learn the local language when they go to school. I've had to adapt my thinking when I realised it probably is a native language learned far away from its source. I think her Greek is improving. She's willing to try anything. So that helps. Greek can seem interesting the way Italian or French are spoken, they are very expressive, projecting themselves strongly. I am going there for two months soon.
Oh that¡¯s interesting Nick! Glad to hear her Greek is improving! Sort of makes me want to learn another language too. I made a resolution to learn French a while ago, just so I can read more books in their original¡but I haven¡¯t really make any progress¡
Two months ! That¡¯s so wonderful! We will be there for two weeks. Excited to be under the Mediterranean sun again, there is something uniquely intoxicating about it that I really love.
