Cinema: Love in a Mass Grave

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But even with the film's faults, most of which derive from the screenplay by Novelist Marguerite (The Sea Wall) Duras, Director Resnais never sinks below a high creative standard. He commands a hysterically expressive performance from Actress Riva, some severely good photography from Takahashi Michio and Sacha Vierni, and an aptly abstract musical score from Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue. But what is most remarkable in the picture is the director's dexterity in combining all these elements and effects. He crosscuts and flashbacks with daring and sureness. He plays words from one sequence against images from another. He dubs sounds from Hiroshima into scenes in France. He chops some episodes off with effective suddenness, and lets others run on like daydreams. And almost everything he does seems brilliantly right. Hiroshima and France, past and present, music and image and language weave together in a seamless mood that is hard to analyze and even harder to resist.

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