A brilliant, trying picture, at once sensitive and blunt, tender and savage, fleshy and spiritual, pacifist and politically realistic, [Hiroshima, Mon Amour] has something for everybody. For the film historian, not only does it provide another item to flesh out that increasingly meaningless label, nouvelle vague; it also uses some important new techniques of flashback. For the film critic, it is just a fine and meaningful film, to borrow a Bergman title, a lesson in love.

Hiroshima shows us a Frenchwoman and a Japanese having an impromptu affair in that city, which she tells us "was made for love." As they embrace, she drily and monotonously reconstructs from her tours of the city the world-wide horror of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and thereafter; later, she recalls as though on an analytic couch her personal horror—the French killing her German lover in the brisk process of liberation and her...