Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour is the story of two people, a French woman and a Japanese man, who find love in the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The film consists of a dialogue between the two characters about their past and present relationships. The director, Alain Resnais, is constantly aware or the concept of time in this film while focusing on memory and past events. The female character explains to the Japanese man her previous love interest while Resnais shows flashbacks of what her memories of this may have looked like. The concept of memory is what the basis of the conversations between the two characters revolve around. The female actress seems to be re-living her previous love interest with the German soldier through her new love affair with the man from Japan. Her old memories of the German soldier have surfaced because of her new relationship. The direction of the film is interesting because it leaves many gaps for the viewer to fill in. The relationship between the two characters is difficult to figure out because the woman seems to caught up in the past to live a normal life in the present. Hiroshima Mon Amour is structured fragmentarily, which creates this disarray of time between past and present.