See nothing of Hiroshima | The Press

“You haven’t seen anything in Hiroshima,” says Eiji Okada to Emmanuelle Riva, who plays her lover in Hiroshima my love. She replies that she has seen charred bodies in the hospital, terrible images of desolation 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.

Alain Resnais’ masterpiece had been selected in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, despite the reservations of the French government, which feared that this indictment for peace would upset some American sensibilities. The French were right. The Americans obtained that this magnificent love story against a backdrop of nuclear anguish, scripted by Marguerite Duras, be presented out of competition.

I remembered the anecdote after seeing Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, in theaters since Friday. The filmmaker ofInception and of Dunkirk chose not to show or reconstruct the images of the devastation of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No trace of Japanese mass graves or cities reduced to dust.

I don’t know if it was out of modesty or out of respect for the Japanese that Christopher Nolan made this decision. He explained that he wanted to focus on how Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atom bomb” and subject of his film, looked at the events. “He learned on the radio that the bombings had taken place in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, like everyone else,” said the filmmaker.

I wonder what people in Japan will think of this film which reminds us that the Americans are, to date, the only people who have used a nuclear weapon on a civilian population. The two bombs claimed some 200,000 lives.

At the very moment when Hiroshima my love took the poster, in the United States, a Senate committee was interested in the course of J. Robert Oppenheimer, hero of the Second World War fallen for his presumed affinities with left-wing intellectuals and communist sympathizers.

Christopher Nolan, who drew inspiration for his screenplay from the biography American Prometheusby Pulitzer Prize-winning Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, presents 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 real victims of his quantum physics theories.

He was in turn Prometheus and Pandora. The one who stole the fire from Zeus, and the one that Zeus created from scratch to take revenge. Prometheus, who ended up chained to a rock, tortured by a vulture. Pandora, who released many curses by uncorking her forbidden jar.

“I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds who annihilates all things,” breathes Oppenheimer, quoting a sacred text of Hinduism, when the first prototype of the atomic bomb explodes, in July 1945. It is an anthology scene. There is no sound after the explosion, shot without digital effects; than Oppenheimer’s gasping breath, and that mushroom of fire rising in the sky above the desert.

Trinity. This is how the physicist baptizes this military exercise on the borders of New Mexico, near the secret base linked to the Manhattan project that he directs in Los Alamos. He brought together some of the greatest scientists of the time. Their objective: to develop nuclear weapons before the Nazis, who took the lead.

Oppenheimer, the son of Jewish German immigrants to the United States—who had works by Picasso, Renoir, and Van Gogh in their collection—needed no convincing to join the war effort. He wants the unprecedented power of the weapon his team has designed to deter men from using it forever. He will regret his candor. For better and especially for worse, he brought the world into the nuclear age.

He is a being of paradoxes and ambivalence, of dilemmas and cases of conscience, like many scientists of his generation. “They were playing sorcerer’s apprentices,” my friend Sonia told me as she left the screening. Some even seemed to take themselves for gods. “God does not play dice”, said Einstein about quantum physics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer carried for the rest of his life the responsibility for the attacks of August 6 and 9, 1945 on Japan, campaigning against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Which got him into a lot of trouble in the United States.

By the time of the bombing of Hiroshima, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered. The Americans nevertheless wanted to make the Japanese pay for the affront of Pearl Harbor and demonstrate – to the world in general and to the Soviets in particular – their military supremacy.

At the end of the Second World War, when his face is on the front page of the magazine Time, Oppenheimer admits to Harry Truman, who receives him at the White House, that he has the impression of having blood on his hands. The American president, exasperated, would have declared in the wake of a collaborator that he never wanted to see “this child of a female dog” in his office again.

“Did you think if you let them tar and feather you, they would forgive you? says his wife (Emily Blunt) to Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), as 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 65 mm film, sometimes in black and white.

The fact remains that despite all the interiority of Cillian Murphy’s acting, excellent, all the effectiveness of the politico-military intrigues surrounding the intriguing character of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr, impeccable), commissioner of atomic energy, despite the breathtaking images of Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer remains an altogether conventional biographical film… for a Christopher Nolan film.

There are a lot of scenes of commissions of inquiry, others where scientists scribble mathematical formulas with chalk on blackboards. So much so that at times I had the impression of discovering an “Oscars film” at the A Beautiful Mind by Ron Howard, more than one of the complex and brilliantly deconstructed auteur blockbusters that Christopher Nolan has accustomed us to.

It’s one thing to humble yourself before your subject. It’s quite another to forget what makes his signature unique. I saw Oppenheimer. I haven’t seen anything from Hiroshima. I was hoping to see more of Nolan.