So this is a movie from 1959, which means that it’s only 14 years away from, y’know Hiroshima. But this mostly isn’t a movie about the bombing at all. Mostly, it’s a sort of Before Sunrise situation: There are two lovers, and she will be returning to France the next morning, so they have this one night together, and there’s going to be a lot of walking and talking.

But it’s not a movie that goes to expected places, and how it paces its revelations out is really at the core of what the movie is doing, so let’s have a spoiler cut.

Spoilers

So one of the realizations we come to quickly is that these two lovers are actually both married, which adds an element of illicitness to their hookup. And this sort of plays out as they continue through this night, with them separating and rejoining each other repeatedly, and pushing each other away before coming back together.

But it’s during a long conversation they have at a bar where the movie peels away the onion to reveal its real core, when the woman tells her backstory. And this is why I’m spoiler-protecting this: Because her backstory, told straight out, is that during the German occupation of France, she fell in love with a German soldier. He was killed, and the people in her town publicly shamed her — cutting her hair, locking her up in her house — for consorting with the enemy.

But the movie doesn’t tell it straight out, because what the movie is really about is memory. And so Alain Resnais, the director, wanted this to unfold like real memories — not in a tidy linear narrative, but with little bits triggered by random images, and then spilling out in a web of loose connections without regard to chronology. And so when this starts up, it’s a bit confusing — she’s talking about her time in this cellar, and you’re like “wait, am I supposed to know what this cellar is? did I miss something?” but then as the scene goes on, she talks about how her mother put her down in the cellar as punishment, and then we continue on more to find out what she was being punished for. And by the end of this scene, we understand what it is that had happened.

And that’s the most direct expression of how the movie is about memory, but it also comes out over the rest of the movie, too, with the two lovers worried about whether they’ll remember each other, and even tying into allusions to memories of the bombing.

There’s a great (spoilery) essay about this movie that I found when googling around after finishing it, and it made a point that really clarified the nature of this type of European art film. Specifically, that as you’re watching it, the question isn’t “what’s going on in the plot?” but “why is the director showing me what they’re showing, and why are they showing it in this way?”

That is, in a movie like this, or basically anything by Antonioni or a handful of others, there’s not a puzzlebox of content, but of form. Really understanding the movie requires you not only to have followed the plot, such as it is, but to be thinking about the formal qualities of the movie — why is it being edited like this? why are we seeing things from the perspectives we’re seeing them? why is the music so apparently wrong for the mood of the scene? Only by asking those questions can you actually get at what the director is doing, and what they’re trying to convey.

And I think that tbh this salts a lot of people’s cocoa. A lot of people don’t want to think about those questions. They want to get fully immersed in the movie, for it to be a transparent window that gets them into the story, not a stained glass affair that they’re supposed to pay attention to in its own right, rather than just looking through. Which is fine as far as it goes, but for my part, I think there’s room for the stained glass windows, too. Not least because they often seem to be the most unsettled, the ones that rattle around in your head and keep connecting up to other things later.

At any rate, this movie is absolutely one of those form-centric stained glass-style movies. Highly recommended if that’s what you’re looking for; extremely disrecommended if you just want yourself a ripping good yarn.

(Also, kind of a random aside, but one of the things I loved about that linked essay is how it put this movie into the landscape of cinematic history, and was able to draw out antecedents and point out its influence on later movies and so forth. But like two-thirds of the way through the essay, I realized that so much of that conversation would have been incomprehensible gibberish to me before 2016. It just tosses in references to works by Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, Vertov, Varda, Rossellini, and a whole bunch of others; and it glosses them in some places, and you don’t need to understand every reference to make sense of the essay, but fundamentally, being familiar with the works referenced makes it a lot more meaningful — lots of “oh yeah, I see that connection” moments. I just love being able to see that web of interconnection. And from now on, whenever I read an essay like that and it references Hiroshima Mon Amour, I’ll understand that comparison, too.)