Les Roches Noires was formerly a hotel, but Marguerite Duras (1914-96) bought an apartment here in 1963. Several of her novels mention the place where she spent so much time, where she set three of her films (La Femme du Gange (1974), India Song (1975) and Le Camion (1977)), and where she met Yann Andréa in 1980. The stepped passage at the side of the former hotel is named after her.
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This book is mainly the screenplay of the Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima mon amour, which is essentially the same as the film. However, the Appendices are interesting, and shed light on the background of the film. Duras describes how the female progagonist, whose early life was spent in Nevers with her pharmacist father, came to meet her German lover: his arm was burned and he sought help, and the pharmacist's daughter cared for his wound on several occasions until he was completely cured. But then, the German followed her on her weekly bicycle rides to a farm for butter and they got to know and love each other in barns and bedrooms. He was her first sexual love, her first emotional love, until he was killed at the end of the war. The following lines reveal the extent of their love, and they intended to marry in Bavaria after the war:
'Son corps était devenu le mien, je n'arrivais plus à l'en discerner. J'étais devenue la négation vivante de la raison. [...]. Que ceux qui n'ont jamais connu d'être ainsi dépossédés d'eux-mêmes me jettent la première pierre' (My body had become his, I could no longer manage to tell the difference. I had become the living denial of reason. [...] Let those who have never known such dispossession of themselves cast the first stone.')
Alain Resnais and scriptwriter Marguerite Duras both agreed that it was impossible to make a film about Hiroshima, and this is the result. Everything is double, not only a collaboration between Resnais and Duras, but memory and forgetting, past and present, life and death, love and war, Nevers and Hiroshima, the personal and the collective, even the film really only has two human characters, male and female, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui (Eiji Okada).
At the beginning we see two bodies (or shoulders of bodies), covered in the dust of the past, until the dust goes and we see two sweating bodies loving each other in Hiroshima: she is a French actor who has been visiting to make a film about peace in a city destroyed by hate, he is a Japanese architect or engineer who wasn't in Hiroshima at the time of the destruction. Both are married to another person.
There is archival footage of the former city, footage of the present rebuilt town in 1958, the museum, and shots of Nevers and its Place de la République where a street is now renamed after Duras and there's a plaque commemorating where the shooting took place. There are reconstructions of Nevers around the time that the bomb hit Hiroshima, when Elle's trauma serves as a personal microcosm of the collective trauma of Hiroshima: she had an affair with a German soldier who was killed, and she lay on his dying body all night, underwent the ritual of the 'tondues' by having her head shaved, rode all night on her bicycle to Paris, away from the traumatic memory. In the present, she says, she doesn't think about the past, although it haunts her in her dreams.
He is the only person she's told about the German and it's here where memory and forgetting merge into a paradoxical oneness. He wants her to stay but it's an impossibility, an impossible love, and this impossible film is one of the most important in the history of cinema.
I've already written about Marguerite Duras's novel L'Amant (1984) – of which this is an adaptation by a French director but in English – and I noted that the Goncourt-winning book isn't her best work: in fact to be honest it's far from it. But although a film version is necessarily different, Duras, having spoken to Annaud a few times before the film was completed, found it 'bizarre' that he thought it was his film: Annaud must have found Duras's attitude bizarre too, and he'd formerly had no problems adapting Umberto Eco's novel Il nome della rosa to the screen, and Eco certainly spoke of his novel and Annaud's film: two distinct entities. Duras had previously called her novel 'shit' and said she was drunk when she wrote it: so she wrote another version of her autobiographical story which was published in 1991 as L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, although Annaud didn't bother to read it. Duras's verdict: 'Rien ne m'attache au film, c'est un fantasme d'un nommé Annaud' ('I have no relation to this film, it's a fantasy by someone called Annaud'.)
Annaud also had problems finding the two protagonists, although he first found Tony Leung Ka-fai as the fifteen-year-old girl's lover, but the girl herself was a problem. Eventually Annaud's wife spotted a model, Jane March, in a fashion magazine, and this was her first role as an actor: she was in fact just eighteen, although she in parts (particularly before the deflowering) just about passes for fifteen.
What can we say of the film? Certainly the choice of the two actors is a good decision as both play very well, and as I remember it this seems to stick closely to the book, although – for obvious commercial reasons – there does appear to be an over-emphasis on the erotic side: the French Wikipédia entry for Jane March (but not the English version as I write) correctly states that March was dubbed 'the sinner from Pinner' (she was born in nearby Edgware and apparently attended school in Pinner). This year, of course, marks the film's thirtieth anniversary.
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