Movie · 1959 · Drama, History, Romance · 1h 32m · NR · French
Curator score: 9.2/10 (188.9K ratings)
From the measureless depths of a woman's emotions...
Overview
The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.2/10
IMDb: 7.8/10
Letterboxd: 4.16/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
TMDB: 7.7/10
Director
Alain Resnais
Production
Argos films, Como Films, Daiei Film, Pathé Overseas
Cast
Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernard Fresson
Where to watch
Darkroom
Curator Review
Verdict
A landmark of the French New Wave: intellectually daring, emotionally bruising, and formally inventive. It blends romance, memory, and postwar trauma into a hypnotic conversation piece that still feels radical.
Best for
viewers who like poetic, essay-like cinema
fans of French New Wave and modernist storytelling
people interested in memory, trauma, and history
audiences who enjoy intimate two-handers with philosophical dialogue
Skip if
you want a straightforward plot
you dislike elliptical, nontraditional editing
you prefer light romance or easy emotional catharsis
you’re impatient with abstract, self-conscious art cinema
Overview
Hiroshima Mon Amour is less a love story than a collision of memory systems: private grief, historical catastrophe, and the unstable present. Resnais turns conversation into excavation, letting the film drift between bodies, places, and recollections until they feel inseparable. The result is austere, sensual, and deeply haunted.
Worth noting
What makes it endure is the way it treats forgetting as both a human defense and a moral failure. The film’s famous opening movement and its recurring refrains give it the force of a poem that keeps revising itself. It can feel remote at first, but that distance is part of the design: the film wants you to feel how impossible it is to fully possess the past.
Bottom line
This is essential viewing for anyone interested in the French New Wave, modernist editing, or cinema as a way of thinking. It is not an easy romance, and it is not meant to be. It is a film about the cost of remembering, and the even stranger cost of not being able to forget.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Luke McCarthy · 4906 likes
A horror movie in which memory is the killer and humanity is the victim.
mia lee vicino (4.5★) · 3782 likes
movie is explicitly about the "horror of forgetting" which means i'm allowed to earnestly transcribe and post my favorite part of the opening 16-minute mono-prologue in a futile effort to remember it, merci beaucoup!
"I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You're destroying me. You're good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How… more
Laura (4★) · 2877 likes
the contrast between the pain of remembering & sharing the story behind your trauma with someone, and the pain caused by fear that you’ll forget that very person you allowed into your memories.
Brendan Michaels · 2046 likes
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”“I saw everything. Everything.”
If there was a film that could leave you speechless but wanting to say so many things about it, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” would be that film.
#1 gizmo fan (5★) · 1872 likes
"The only memory I have left is your name... I yearn for you so badly I can't bear it anymore."
1960 · Drama, Crime · 1h 30m · NR · Curator 8.7/10 (374.9K ratings) · Where to watch: Darkroom, Max
Essential French New Wave energy, with a looser, more impulsive style that still shares the era’s fascination with youth, time, and cinematic self-awareness.