Hiroshima Mon Amour

Hiroshima Mon Amour opens with the voices and almost abstract shots of two naked lovers in bed, before cutting to scenes of postwar Hiroshima. Over these the lovers continue to talk of love, loss, memory, forgetting, and, inevitably, the Bomb. As well as making our own pillow talk feel a mite inconsequential, this classic Alain Resnais film from 1959 thus conforms to our expectations of French arthouse fare: sexy, discursive, monochrome, and just a soupçon pretentious.

Yet this story of a brief, intense affair between a French actress on location in Hiroshima and a local architect slowly opens out to become a fascinating meditation on the legacy of the Second World War for two countries for whom that legacy was far more complex and fraught than our own. Also out on DVD is Resnais' pioneering and still shocking documentary about the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955). Watching these two films may atone for going to see Michael Bay's latest. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]