Points off for the unnatural, weighty and abstracted dialogue. It also occasionally gets really boring. The rest of the time, however, it's magnificent, fascinating, hyponitizing, multi-layered, beautiful and hideous.

quite some unnecessary scenes towards the end, unfortunately.

An incredible film.

Delicately flirts with the paradoxical relationship between the self and memory: we are the culmination of collected remembered moments, yet we shape and distort them. Aspects of the film were awkward: the slightly obnoxious unconventionality; and the wooden expression of Okada Eiji (doing his best to speak in French). Overall however - when it focussed on being a film about love and memory - it was a really rewarding film experience with a beautiful restless mood.

My first thought after watching it was "So what?" It just didn't impress me.

I...didn't get this.

This extremely melancholy, hour-and-a-half-long narration of a woman's life, whose audience is a man who asks her many questions in a stoic, wooden manner, does little to create a riveting story and does even less to produce good chemistry between the two lovers. Some poetic writing and good camerawork can't cover the film's dullness.

This is a fairly mesmorising tale of love, loss, pain and pleasure. It skilfully bridges the gap between the past, present and future, by positing that we are the sum of our experiences, governed by the way that our memory colors the world that we see before our eyes. The dialogue is both lyrical and elegant, and for me the abstract nature of it only added to the hypnotic experience of this film. The pain of forgetting is one thing, but the pain of never doing is perhaps more important.

There are plenty of great themes to kick around here: romantic longing between different cultural perspectives, memory as identity, the distress of Postwar Hiroshima, etc. But I just enjoyed seeing Japan through the lens of a French filmmaker (two of my favorite countries, as cinema goes). The cinematography is amazing. It does stumble over its own heightened, poetic, somewhat forced dialogue, but otherwise it's great.

96

Parts were good and parts were bad. The romance was pretty uninteresting to me. The memory sections were interesting but got a tad repetitive. I like the perspective it gave on the dropping of the bomb during WWII, something I've never seen in a movie before or since. It just didn't click with me for whatever reason, I guess it's not my thing.