I Understand/You Understand Nothing

Hiroshima Mon Amour(1959)

Directed By Alain Resnais

Hiroshima Mon Amour is a beautiful, lyrical, sexy, gorgeously shot, romantic, and dizzying film.I didn’t find it sexist as one freind of mine told it was (the slap? If a character is sexist, does that mean the entire film is as well?), or merely the tale of two cultures meeting.A Japanese architect whose family was in Hiroshima when the bomb fell, and a French actress in the city to shoot a film about "peace", have an affair. The first 20 minutes are incredible, disturbing, haunting, surreal montage of images and poetic narration. "I saw the sorrow of Hiroshima", she says in bed. "You saw nothing" he responds. The two are both married, but have an intense affair, that despite or maybe because there meeting is omitted, is made all the more sensual, desperate, and genuine. The music and cinematography is flawless. The actress’s back story dominates for the most part there after. She recounts her first love and disgrace, retold in flashbacks, about one of the even greater cultural taboos, and I imagine a critique of French politics of collusion in WW2; her love for a young Nazi soldier. But there’s more here than just politics and to look at this film on only a political level is to miss, the heart of the film. This heart is not that love conquers all, but that desire is irrepressible and has no social or moral compass. It can bring despair and ruin, or come from the ashes of the same place. Pain cannot be separated from pleasure ever, or both diminish and wither away in memory. The architect imagines he understands her story of love lost, just as she imagines she understands his story of the bombing of his hometown. Both of them by the end, realize they cant or don’t want to truly understand these stories anyway. Their relationship is not the kind of love that your grandparents shared or didn’t, but desire itself; fleeting and all consuming. It may be for only a moment when both of them are between their own private worlds, but it is a love, true as any. And as for the ending feeling incomplete, which I’ve heard some people suggest, I think that’s how it should be. In the final scene the couple is staring at each other from across the room in silence, only speaking to say aloud to someone else, what they mean for each other to hear.

Despite All My Rage, I Am Still Just A Rat In A Cage

Mon Oncle d'Amerique (1980) directed by Alain Resnais

It's allot like a Greek Tragedy, except the chorus is supplemented by evolutionary psychologist and pharmacologist Henri Labroit explaining the actions of the characters in terms of his ideas concerning human and mammal behavior; consumption behavior, escape behavior, combat behavior, and inhibition behavior.
We trace the lives of three characters from birth through childhood, and into the drama of their adult lives. Their adult lives are full of struggles with career, family, relationships, intersecting at times, but only as dramatic as real life allows. Its the way Alain Resnais constructs the stories that makes them fascinating. We observe them largely as a scientist might, in terms of parents, environment, traits, and habits. At one point Labroit discusses shock experiments done on mice, in later scenes we flash back to the characters who have giant mouse heads, the effect is startling and funny, at once.
The most complex human emotions are rendered as functions of the animal brain, human relationships are as simple as mice being given aversion therapy, or as complex, depending on how you look at it. Labroit and Resnais seems at odds at times, about the miraculousness and simplicity of it all, but it helps to make the movie more dynamic. It's educational and informational as a science documentary, but the drama is so well integrated the intellectual stimulation is offset, by a real sense of attachment and catharsis for and with the characters. The problems of their lives are those everyone experiences, Gerard Depardieu is a devout catholic, raised on a farm, who works at a factory and is struggling with being downsized.

Nicole Garcia is raised by communist parents, and becomes an actress and later a stylist, having an affair with the married...Roger Pierre, the head of the French Ministry of Radio, raised by an affluent family, who longs to write a book about the history of the sun.
Ive only seen two Resnais films, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year At Marienbad" (which I fell asleep while watching twice), and this is somewhere between the emotional fallout of the first and the experimental daring of the later, but its my favorite of the three. An enthralling, fascinating, and profound film, that's as emotionally disarming as it is intellectually engaging. Visually it's stunning as well. The final image of the Forest mural on the building speaks volumes. I need more Resnais in my life.