Admittedly, I haven’t read in French for a while so that I might have been rusty going into this. But I really don’t understand this book. Plus, screenplays aren’t the most common format of literature that I digest (or plays for that matter) so that the form itself is a bit jarring to me. But like I said, I really don’t understand this book.
The screenplay was invoked by the request of the director Alain Resnais, who was engaged to create a documentary on Hiroshima but refused as he had prior directed a holocaust documentary. He wanted to direct a story and believed that Marguerite Duras was the perfect writer who can depict the effects of the war to everyday people.
Contrary to what you think what the story might be based on the title, it is not about when the nuclear bomb went off in the city. The events that took place happened over a decade after the bombs fell to take away the hundred thousands of lives within minutes. Hiroshima is a place, as much as a name is a person. A place carries with it memories, sentiments and character as a person would. Hiroshima, though only the setting for the story acts almost as a third character in the story.
The two main characters are lovers by chance, but somehow ended up on an affair. The story starts off towards the conclusion of the affair, where the woman (only referred to as “Her”) only has one day to spare in Hiroshima. She is an actress and her scenes as a nurse were almost at a wrap. The man, a young Japanese engineer (only referred to as “Him”) says very little, but is trying hard to convince her to stay.
She went off, got caught in a crowd of protesters where he managed to catch her and they reconvened. In the latter meeting she relived her past as a young girl in a French village (Nevers), where she fell into a relationship with an occupying German soldier, her first love. Her Japanese in some ways, became a vessel to act out her memories and he played along accordingly. The story focuses more on her emotional turbulence than the engineer’s.
The dialogue in the screenplay is short, to the point of curt. Duras’s directions on what shots to put in between takes, the position of the actors and what sort of lighting the director should use are more verbose than what is being said on screen. At some point, she offered the director a choice of various shots with different alternatives, almost like a Wong Kar Wai movie. In my Folio edition, as the movie had already been released, the book also described what decisions Alain Resnais took relative to the screenplay.
And like the feels of Wong Kar Wai movies, it deals with impossibly relationships doomed from the beginning. In this case, the war in France and the atomic bomb has adverse effects on the mental health of the characters. I suppose this is what the director is trying to achieve from the beginning, that war makes for broken people, who can no longer function normally, expect happiness and what is worse, creating an addiction to this type of depression.
In the back of the book, we also see other documents in the appendix which includes her account of the story when she was in Nevers, the detailed description of him and her. I suppose it is extra material which would be available for the actors and the director, but not something that is immediately apparent to the movie audience unless they read the screenplay to go with it.
The screenplay feels very arthousey, and I still couldn’t get my hands on the movie, so I’d need to judge on how arthouse it is. Is it too nuanced, too different? There are images of the victims of the atomic bomb spliced with the dialogues between the two lovers, as though in the back of their minds, when they should be experiencing something akin to euphoria, they are instead distracted by the events that took place years and years before. In the end, I am still left confused with the screenplay, and maybe the only remedy is to watch the movie — the format it is designed for.
