The love she has in Hiroshima has some incredible erotic moments, even if they are brief and restrained. As she speaks about it, she uses pronouns as if she were still talking to her old lover, and we can see from the flashbacks just how crushed she was - driven to madness, shunned by the French townspeople as a traitor, and made to live silently in a cold cellar by her parents. She's still traumatized by this, so much so that she sees this new lover as a version of the man she knew from the past, and a pale version at that. They're both married, she's due to fly back to France, and she confesses that she's never gotten over a forbidden affair she had as a teenager with a German soldier fourteen years earlier, during the war. The premise is fairly simple: a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) has a short affair with a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) while she's in Hiroshima acting in a film, but both of them know it's short-lived.
The cinematography is beautiful, both in Hiroshima and the Loire Valley, and director Alain Resnais tells the story brilliantly via flashbacks and meaningful little moments, those which would stand out in one's memory. It's got an undercurrent of anti-war messaging in it as we see the horrifying results of the atomic bomb in graphic detail, but the film is more than that. A poetic and haunting film about the tragedy of death, the ability people have of picking up the pieces and moving on, and yet history inexorably repeating itself, both in individual lives and with mankind.
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