Hiroshima Mon Amour

The Buddhist teaching on impermanence is usually delivered as comfort: nothing lasts, so release your grip. Hiroshima Mon Amour delivers the same truth as a form of horror. The actress remembers her German soldier, shot dead at the Liberation, his body cooling under her for an entire day while she went mad in a cellar. Now, years later, she can barely reach the memory. "I begin to see you less clearly," she tells the Japanese man in the same breath she uses to recall the dead one. The two men are dissolving into each other because both are dissolving, period.

The film's cruelest insight is that healing and forgetting cannot be separated. She wept for the German until she could bear it, and bearing it meant losing him. This is the meaning of the museum sequence, the endless reconstructed hair and melted stone displayed so that Hiroshima will be "remembered forever." The film knows this is impossible. Everything the museum preserves is proof that the thing itself is gone. The city rebuilt itself in fourteen years, neon and bicycles over the crater. Impermanence does not console the grieving here. It is what steals the beloved a second time, from the inside.

Jung held that the personal unconscious and the collective catastrophe speak the same symbolic language, and that we approach the unbearable large wound only through the private one we can hold. The actress cannot feel Hiroshima. It is too vast. But she can feel Nevers, her hometown, where she was shaved and shamed and locked away for loving the enemy. Resnais cuts between the two cities until they rhyme: a hand, a river, a body on a floor.

Nevers is her shadow, the disowned self she has never told anyone, buried so deep that speaking it to a stranger in a foreign city feels like the first confession of her life. Only by descending into her own small hell does the enormous one become real to her. In the last scene she names them: "Hiroshima. That is your name." "Nevers. In France." They have become each other's cities, each the buried underside of the other, and neither can be entered without the other opening too.