Brief Encounter with the atomic bomb

I've suggested on several occasions that one of the reasons why foreign films have always had a poor reputation in the minds of a reasonable segment of the population is that critic types tend to praise certain films simply for not being commercial or the way Hollywood did things when, in fact, these movies really aren't that good to begin with. One of those movies that made me think of this is Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which will be on TCM overnight tonight at 2:00 AM as part of the TCM Imports spot.

Emmanuelle Riva plays an unnamed actress who is in Hiroshima, the first city subjected to the atomic bomb at the end of World War II, some 14 years after the bombing. She's there to make an international propaganda movie against nuclear weapons, and is traipsing around the museum dedicated to documenting the bombing and its survivors. But she's really relating all of this to her new boyfriend, a married architect (Eiji Okada), as they're in bed together.

The man, who survived the bombing and presumably lost a bunch of friends and family in the bombing, thinks that she really doesn't understand the horrors of war, and has no compunctions about telling her so. So she responds by telling of her own experience in the war.

She was a teenaged girl during the Nazi occupation of France, and somehow met and fell in love with a German soldier. (Riva, who was born in 1927, would have been 32 at the time of filming and 17 when France was liberated, so the character is actually the right age to have had an older German soldier boyfriend in the war.) For fairly obvious reasons, this sort of collaborationism would have been frowned upon once France was liberated, so after the liberation, the inhabitatants of the small city where she grew up and where all of this happened locked her up for some time. When she was released, her mom made her leave for Paris, she arriving on the day news broke of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Still, the story doesn't end here. Our actress has to leave for France in the morning, but she wanders around town until the architect finds her again so that they can talk some more. And they talk, and talk, and talk. Eventually the movie just ends, mercifully enough for the viewer.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a perfect example of the sort of movie that has tons of pseudo-philosophical conversation but never really goes anywhere, with the one story that it does have in the middle -- the actress' story of what she did in the war -- not having a satisfactory ending. And yet, because this is very much different from Hollywood filmmaking, or even some of the French New Wave filmmakers like Truffaut in The 400 Blows, there are critics who praise it to high heaven. Sorry, but Hirsohima, Mon Amour is just a tedious 90-minute talkfest.

But, as always, judge for yourself, since it's on tonight.