This is a failed love story, one might say. From the get-go, it seems like it should be the story of how two lovers connected through time, but when He and She meet (with their archetypal names), they don't find love together. So where is the love? Well, the title suggests that their love has been spent on Hiroshima in mourning. Hiroshima Mon Amour seems to suggest that their true love is the state they enjoyed before their community was decimated by nuclear bombs.
Their quest for union and love takes them into the heart of their suffering, especially when She realizes that He his family died in Hiroshima. The scene seems to portray her as unloving or uncaring, but the truth is that they have already been exposed to this kind of sadness before. This is the feeling that describes their state of normalcy, so when she responds with ennui, it is not a mark of indifference but of absolute desolation. She has no more to give.
By zooming out, the audience can see a broader picture. Instead of seeing the boy-meets-girl story on its surface, perhaps the man and woman can be seen as symbols for intimacy and the attempt of intimacy. In the new world created by nuclear bombs and the horrors of modern warfare, a lot of what makes humans interconnected seems damaged. How can they connect when the horrors of their daily life are so amplified that they can't seem to stop thinking about horror and agony? How will people connect in a world of paranoia and panic? That is the main question the film evokes.
In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais uses the tracking shot to emphasize the ethics of the characters and link it to a disjointed sense of space where the consciousness of the film spectator is linked to the subjectivity of the character, which fails to produce a recollection-image. For Resnais, this failure can be resolved precisely through forgetting which becomes a method of awakening from the perpetual present of the film viewing experience: a code to link to the perpetual present i.e. death. Earlier Resnais had already explored the crisis of representation produced by the force of history, in his documentary Night and Fog, in which he juxtaposed footage of Nazi concentration camps and their extant reality in 1957, to emphasize the short-circuit between actuality and history, and the consequent cinematographic image of trauma.
Instead of telling a story, Resnais was more engaged in the structure of the story and its link to the image. As opposed to one having narrator, Hiroshima Mon Amour had two. Their recollections in the film produce images that elucidate the contradictory relationship between thought and feeling. Like Michelangelo Antonioni, Resnais attempts to make a film about feelings instead of characters eschewing descriptive psychology so that the film captures the character-actor’s psyche and transforms the psychic state of the spectator on projection.
