CINEOS Premiere

Hiroshima Mon Amour

A French woman and a Japanese man share one night, and her buried grief from another war rises until she can no longer tell his body from a dead lover's — a film about whether pain can ever cross from one person to another.

Duras's incantatory dialogue and the hypnotic images pull you into a near-trance while the content — atrocity, forgetting, the failure of love to transmit grief — keeps a low unease alive underneath. It never lets the two kinds of loss, one woman's and a whole city's, settle into the same scale, so what you carry is a vertigo rather than tears. The question it asks — can suffering ever cross from one person to another — has no answer, and it keeps working in you for days.