H-Story

The film revolves around the French actress Béatrice Dalle who plays the French actress Béatrice Dalle in a Japanese film. The film in the film is a Japanese remake of the famous French classic Hiroshima mon amour (1959) by Alain Resnais. So Dalle does not just play herself as actress, she also has to literally follow in the footsteps of Emmanuelle Riva who played the lead in the original film. In the filminthefilm, she plays an actress who has come from France to Hiroshima to play a role in a film about peace. The film looks at itself in the mirror and sees a film is also looking at itself in the mirror. If there is one film that aptly fits this lookingglass theme, then this is it.Suwa himself plays the filmmaker making the film who eventually doesn’t succeed in his ambitious mirror images of film and history, history and film. Suwa, himself born in Hiroshima, takes this indirect path in an attempt to express something of the tragedy of the city that cannot be directly designated.Between the scenes on the set, there are several documentarylike conversations between Suwa and the wellknown novelist Kou Machida. The essayist character of the film and the impossibility of portraying the horror of Hiroshima are strengthened by these conversations, and by the recurring archive footage of the devastated city.