Last week, I panned Jean-Luc Godard's latest film, Goodbye to Language, because while I'm generally willing to watch plotless French films, this one was just a mess—in 3D! And a mess that, thanks to Godard's fame, will invariably be read as artful. (When I read the glowing reviews of Godard's latest, I'll just imagine they're being written about his earlier works, because, in a sense, they are.) I find movies like Goodbye to Language deeply irritating, because they turn people off of avant-leaning films more generally, including the good ones. And that's too bad. Because there are so many glorious, plotless French movies out there if you're open to that sort of thing (including some of Godard's own earlier films).

Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour is one of these movies. It's a legit classic, and I got to see it last week for this week's episode of Film Shorts, and though it can be hard to watch at times, it's endlessly creative and complex and just the right thing to see after Godard's shambling mess, like a soothing cup of OH YES I DO REALLY LIKE NONLINEAR FILMS THAT ARE CHALLENGING, THAT'S VERY TRUE. Here's what I wrote about it:

Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour is widely credited with catapulting the French New Wave into existence, and for good reason: Resnais used a screenplay by experimental novelist Marguerite Duras, crews in France and Japan, and quick cuts mirroring memory (revolutionary for the time) to make a movie that isn't so much about the bombing of Hiroshima, but about the impossibility of describing the horrors of World War II on screen. Resnais' leads, Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Rivas, are perfectly cast as a Japanese architect and a French actress who discuss violence and forgetting before never seeing each other again.

That's right! If you've ever tried to impress someone by talking about your love for the French New Wave*, you owe it to Resnais to go see his movie! What's especially interesting about Hiroshima Mon Amour is that Resnais enlisted Marguerite Duras to write his screenplay. Her script enlists repetition in a way that gives it a beautiful, looping structure, and her unnamed characters, while they remain mysterious, never seem like cold archetypes. With the exception of purple-haired, wondrous avowed feminist Agnes Varda, many of the directors of the French New Wave often didn't do a great job of characterizing women (a good case in point is our pal Godard, whose Patricia in Breathless is pretty much a cipher, #sorrynotsorry), so it's refreshing to see that the film that started it all actually contained a fully-realized, complicated, slightly unhinged but very real female character. This is to say nothing of the film's meditation on memory and the collective unconscious, its beautifully framed shots, and its moments that dip into the surreal. Go! Now! Thank me later!

*I've NEVER done this.