“You didn’t see anything in Hiroshima,” says Eiji Okada to Emmanuelle Riva, who plays his lover mon amour in Hiroshima. She replies that she saw charred bodies in the hospital, horrific images of the devastation in the museum. “The temperature of the sun on the Place de la Paix. how to ignore it she asks him in her soft voice. “You didn’t see anything in Hiroshima. Nothing,” he repeats.
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Alain Resnais’s masterpiece was selected in the official competition of the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, despite reservations from the French government, which feared that this indictment of peace would shake the sensibilities of some Americans. The French were right. The Americans managed to get this great love story against the backdrop of nuclear fear, written by Marguerite Duras, presented out of competition.
I remembered the anecdote after seeing Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” which opened in theaters Friday. The filmmaker of “Inception” and “Dunkirk” refrained from showing or reconstructing the images of the destruction of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No sign of Japanese mass graves or cities crumbled to dust.
I don’t know if Christopher Nolan made this decision out of humility or out of respect for the Japanese. He explained that he wanted to focus on how Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” and subject of his film, viewed the events. “He found out on the radio that the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings had happened, like everyone else,” says the filmmaker.
I wonder what the people of Japan will think of this film, which reminds us that the Americans are the only people to date who have used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population. The two bombs claimed around 200,000 lives.
Just as Hiroshima mon amour was hitting theaters in the US, a Senate committee was investigating the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a fallen World War II hero, for his alleged affinity with leftist intellectuals and communist sympathizers.
Christopher Nolan, whose screenplay was inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, portrays Oppenheimer as both a tortured genius and a martyr to McCarthyism, an ambitious and arrogant gifted man, a chain seducer, and a man haunted by the true victims of his quantum physics theories.
He was in turn Prometheus and Pandora. The one who stole fire from Zeus and the one whom Zeus created from scratch to take revenge. Prometheus was eventually chained to a rock and tortured by a vulture. Pandora who released many curses by opening her forbidden jar.
“I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds who destroys all things,” breathes Oppenheimer, quoting a sacred Hindu text, when the first prototype of the atomic bomb explodes in July 1945. It’s an anthology scene. No sound after explosion, recording without digital effects; as Oppenheimer’s gasping breath and that mushroom of fire rising in the desert sky.
trinity. That’s what the physicist calls this military exercise on the New Mexico border, near the secret base of the Manhattan Project, which he directs in Los Alamos. He brought together some of the greatest scientists of his time. Their goal: to develop nuclear weapons before the Nazis took over.
PHOTO MELINDA SUE GORDON PROVIDED BY UNIVERSAL
Cillian Murphy (left), Olli Haaskivi, Matt Damon and Dane DeHaan in Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer, the son of Jewish German immigrants to the United States who had works by Picasso, Renoir, and Van Gogh in his collection, needed no convincing to join the war effort. He wants to harness the weapon’s unparalleled power, which his team has developed to forever stop men from using it. He will regret his openness. For better and worse, he led the world into the nuclear age.
Like many scientists of his generation, he is a being of paradoxes and ambivalences, of dilemmas and consciences. “They were playing sorcerers’ apprentices,” my friend Sonia told me as she left the performance. Some even seemed to think of themselves as gods. “God doesn’t play dice,” Einstein said of quantum physics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer bore responsibility for the August 6 and 9, 1945 attacks on Japan for the rest of his life and fought against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Which got him into big trouble in the United States.
By the time Hiroshima was bombed, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered. Still, the Americans wanted to make the Japanese pay for the Pearl Harbor affront and demonstrate—to the world in general and to the Soviets in particular—their military superiority.
PHOTO MELINDA SUE GORDON PROVIDED BY UNIVERSAL
Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer
At the end of World War II, with his face on the cover of Time magazine, Oppenheimer confessed to Harry Truman, who received him at the White House, that he thought he had blood on his hands. The American president, following a collaborator’s entourage, said in exasperation that he never wanted to see “this child of a bitch” in his office again.
“Did you think they’d forgive you if you let them tar and feather you? says his wife (Emily Blunt) to Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) when the US government turns its back on her. It’s a phrase that sums up the psychological depth of this ambitious three-hour film, shot on 65mm film, partly in black and white.
The fact remains that for all the inwardness of Cillian Murphy’s excellent acting, all the effectiveness of the political-military intrigue surrounding the intriguing character of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr., impeccable), Commissioner for Atomic Energy, despite the stunning visuals of Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer remains a wholly conventional biographical film… for a Christopher Nolan film.
There are many scenes of commissions of inquiry, others where scientists scrawl mathematical formulas with chalk on blackboards. So much so that at times I felt like I was discovering an “Oscar film” a la Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, rather than one of the complex and brilliantly deconstructed author’s blockbusters to which Christopher Nolan has accustomed us.
It’s one thing to humble yourself before your subject. It’s another thing entirely to forget what makes your signature unique. I’ve seen Oppenheimer. I haven’t seen anything from Hiroshima. I was hoping to see more from Nolan.