flat6

This one defies description. I can tell you it's a documentary on the Roma people, but think of it more as a series of sketches by real-life Borats. Yet, don't be misled into thinking it's some forced slapstick. It's utterly real, which makes it even more absurd and hilarious than Borat, while also giving it this intense humanity, a poignant warmth. It's one of the most disarming looks at human nature I've ever seen, exposing our frivolity and delusions without being mean, condescending or condemning.

For what it is - a partial look at the Roma community, focusing on their lovable quirks more than their faults - this movie succeeds brilliantly. Would recommend it unqualifiedly, without reservation.

This movie offended me. Not because I didn't enjoy it (and I didn't, by the way... I found its love story tedious and pretentious; but that's a separate, insignificant matter). No, I found it offensive because I can't stand it when movies use atrocities as their playbox, as impressive backdrops left unexplored. Splicing newsreels of Hiroshima's devastation into a love story is a disservice to those who were devastated by this tragedy, in my opinion. I gives me the same feeling as Hotel Rwanda did: the complete failure of trying to explain/comprehend a human tragedy of epochal proportions by focusing on the individual story of a couple/family. This kind of approach is so open to interpretation, so light and inadequate, that it just falls flat on its face, in my opinion.

Obviously, if you enjoyed it, good for you, but for my taste, whenever I see photos/newsreel footage of stuff like the Holocaust or Rwanda or Hiroshima, I want the movie to focus only on that, with the seriousness and dryness of a documentary. Cutting to a love story is to me a complete let-down, no matter how tragic or pensive that one love story may be. So in my opinion, Alain Resnais, the director of this movie, got it right four years earlier with his 1955 "Nuit et brouillard" (Night and Fog), which looks at concentration camps not through a love story, but through a strikingly direct and blunt documentary.

I understand and appreciate that people get other things from "Hiroshima mon amour": contemplations on love, forgiveness, forgetfulness, etc. But please, use some other setting as a backdrop for these contemplations. Because whether the filmmakers intended this or not, the viewer's mind inevitably compares the tragedy of the lovers' affairs with the tragedy of Hiroshima. And that's just such a lopsided comparison that even the slightest insinuation of it is completely distasteful.