Persistence of the past

I watched Alain Resnais' beautiful and haunting "Hiroshima Mon Amour" on DVD last night.
This 1959 French feature's story is deceptively simple: A French actress visiting Hiroshima has an affair with a Japanese man. He listens as she recalls her first, tragic love, with a German soldier in the last days of occupied France.
While the story seems simple, the film-making is anything but, as Resnais mingles the past with the present to display the "long struggle between love and its own erosion through the passage of time," as film critic Pierre Kast wrote in "Cahiers du Cinema."
Of course, the setting is also significant. The film is set 14 years after the atomic bomb shattered Hiroshima, and the scars -- physical, mental and emotional -- so obviously remain.
One of my goals this year is to revisit the French Nouvelle Vague of cinema. Last night, I took a great stride toward that goal.