Alain Resnais didn’t just make a movie in 1959. He dropped a psychological bomb. When Hiroshima Mon Amour premiered, it shattered how people thought about time, memory, and skin. But today, if you browse Letterboxd or sit through a film grad seminar, the conversation has shifted. People are talking about Hiroshima mon amour sexism and whether the movie’s "poetic" approach to a woman’s trauma is actually just a bit... well, patronizing.
It’s a heavy watch. You’ve got the haunting imagery of the atomic aftermath juxtaposed against the tangled limbs of two lovers. It’s beautiful. It’s also deeply weird.
The film follows an unnamed French actress (played by Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They have a brief, intense affair in post-war Hiroshima. She’s there to make a film about peace. He’s there being handsome and mysterious. But as they talk, the "sexism" critique usually starts with how the man treats her memories. He constantly tells her, "You saw nothing in Hiroshima." He negates her experience. Is that a profound philosophical statement on the impossibility of understanding another's pain? Or is it just a guy gaslighting a woman in a cafe?
Honestly, it’s probably both.
The Problem With the "Universal" Female Suffering
Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay. That’s important. You can’t talk about Hiroshima mon amour sexism without acknowledging that a woman—one of the most formidable intellectuals of the 20th century—penned these lines. Duras was obsessed with the idea that women carry a specific, localized kind of pain that the world tries to crush.
In the film, the French woman’s "great trauma" is revealed to be her head being shaved in Nevers, France, because she fell in love with a German soldier during the occupation. The movie tries to equate her personal disgrace and the loss of her lover with the literal nuclear annihilation of a city.
Some critics, like those writing for Cahiers du Cinéma back in the day, found this revolutionary. They saw it as an exploration of subjective memory. But many modern viewers find it incredibly lopsided. There’s an inherent gender dynamic where the woman is the "vessel" of emotion and trauma, while the man acts as the stoic, almost secondary witness to her breakdown. He prompts her. He slaps her at one point to "bring her back" to reality. It’s a trope we’ve seen a thousand times: the hysterical woman needs the firm hand of a rational man to navigate her own mind.
✨ Don't miss: Cuba Gooding Jr OJ: Why the Performance Everyone Hated Was Actually Genius
Is the "Japanese Man" Just a Prop?
While we're digging into the Hiroshima mon amour sexism angle, we have to look at Eiji Okada’s character. He doesn’t even have a name. In the script, he’s just "He."
He exists primarily to facilitate her monologue. While she gets a complex, jagged backstory involving cellars and madness in Nevers, he is a symbol of a scarred city. He is hyper-masculine, polite, and persistent. He follows her through the streets, begging her to stay, essentially becoming a mirror for her to look at herself.
There’s a subtle sexism in how the female lead is written as "too much"—too much memory, too much desire, too much talk—while the man is reduced to a supporting role in her psychodrama. It flips the usual "disposable woman" trope on its head, but it replaces it with a different kind of imbalance. She is the "madwoman," and he is the "observer."
The Nevers Sequence and Gendered Punishment
Think about the hair.
The scene where her hair is shorn by the townspeople is visceral. It’s a specifically gendered punishment. Men who collaborated were often shot; women were humiliated, stripped of their beauty, and turned into social pariahs.
Duras and Resnais are clearly sympathetic to her. They aren't the ones being sexist; they are depicting a sexist society. However, the film lingers on her degradation in a way that feels almost voyeuristic. We watch her crawl in the dirt. We watch her scream in a cellar. The camera loves her misery. This "aestheticization of female suffering" is a core pillar of the Hiroshima mon amour sexism debate. We are asked to find her pain poetic. We are asked to find her "brokenness" erotic.
🔗 Read more: Greatest Rock and Roll Singers of All Time: Why the Legends Still Own the Mic
- The Male Gaze vs. The Duras Voice: Even though a woman wrote it, Resnais directed it. His camera lingers on Riva’s neck, her shoulders, and her tears.
- Negation of Experience: The repetitive dialogue ("You saw nothing") acts as a verbal erasure of her perspective.
- The "Muse" Complex: The actress is in Hiroshima to make a film, but she spends the whole time being "the subject" of the architect's fascination.
Why the Dialogue Feels Like Gaslighting Today
"You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing."
He says it over and over. If someone said that to you today during a date, you’d probably block their number. In the context of 1959 French New Wave cinema, it was meant to be a deconstruction of documentary truth. He’s telling her that looking at museum exhibits and recreations isn't the same as knowing the event.
But when you look at it through the lens of gender, it’s a man telling a woman that her observations are invalid. It’s a man defining the boundaries of what she is allowed to "know."
The French woman eventually gives in. She accepts his framing. She begins to doubt her own senses. This power dynamic is rarely balanced in the film. Even though she is the protagonist, he is the one who directs the flow of their interactions. He decides when they talk, where they go, and when the "truth" has been reached.
Looking Beyond the Surface
It’s easy to dismiss the film as a relic of its time, but that’s lazy. The Hiroshima mon amour sexism discussion is actually what keeps the movie relevant. If it were a perfect, politically correct film, we’d stop talking about it.
The tension comes from the fact that the movie is trying to be radical while being stuck in the gender norms of the late 50s. The French woman is liberated in her sexuality—she’s married and having an affair without much guilt—yet she’s completely trapped by her memories and the men who define them.
💡 You might also like: Ted Nugent State of Shock: Why This 1979 Album Divides Fans Today
She tells him, "I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me."
That’s a classic Duras line. It suggests that love is a form of mutual destruction. But in this movie, the destruction seems to happen mostly to her. He remains relatively intact. He goes back to his life. She is left wandering the halls of a hotel, repeating the name "Nevers" like a ghost.
Actionable Insights for Modern Viewers
If you're planning to watch or re-watch this milestone of cinema, don't just take it as a "masterpiece" at face value. Use these perspectives to get more out of the experience:
- Watch the Power Structure: Pay attention to who starts the conversations and who ends them. Count how many times the male lead interrupts or contradicts her. It changes how you view the "romance."
- Research the "Femmes Tondues": To understand the sexism she faced in France, look up the history of women whose heads were shaved after the Liberation. It provides necessary context for why her character feels so "lesser than" in her own mind.
- Read the Screenplay: Marguerite Duras’s stage directions are often more revealing than the film itself. She describes the female character’s internal state in ways that Resnais sometimes misses with his camera.
- Compare to "India Song": If you want to see how Duras handled these themes when she directed her own films, watch India Song. It’s even more experimental and deals with the female "voice" in a much more direct way.
The "sexism" in Hiroshima Mon Amour isn't necessarily a flaw that ruins the movie. It's a feature of its era and a reflection of the complicated relationship between a male director and a female writer. By acknowledging it, we actually see the film more clearly. We see the struggle to find words for trauma in a world that, at the time, didn't really want to hear women speak unless they were playing a part.
The movie ends with them renaming each other after their cities. "Hiroshima, that’s your name," she says. "And your name is Nevers. Nevers-in-France." They aren't people anymore. They are just locations for pain. And in that final reduction, the film leaves us wondering if true equality between a man and a woman is even possible when they are both haunted by a history that treated them so differently.