In war, one of the most affected segments of society is women. They endure the worst fears before the war, try to withstand the humiliation and torture during it and, if they survive the rapes and ravages of war, they end up living with memories that haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Three of the best films that beautifully capture this trauma of war in lingering memories of women are Hiroshima Mon Amour, Mrs Dalloway and Sophie’s Choice. Two of these are based on writings by women: Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras. Meanwhile, the third owes a lot to its female protagonist, Meryl Streep.

Perhaps one of the first women writers to capture the trauma of war in the 20th century was Virginia Woolf. So, we begin our discussion with Mrs Dalloway, which resonates with the memories of the First World War.

Woolf was not even 60 when she drowned herself in 1941, haunted by her own depressing memories of the First World War and fears of an impending annihilation of civilisation during the Second World War at the hands of the Fascists and the Nazis. She was in her thirties when she witnessed the horrors of the most destructive war, from 1914 to 1918. Seven years after the end of WWI, Woolf completed her novel, Mrs Dalloway, which examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a Londoner married to a parliamentarian.

With most Western governments refusing to even acknowledge how the holocaust in Gaza has particularly impacted children and women, Naazir Mahmood takes a look at three Western films that have hauntingly depicted the trauma of war on women and on their lingering memories of it

MRS DALLOWAY AND WORLD WAR ONE

Just as in her first novel — The Voyage Out — which she wrote at the beginning of the war, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway also reflects her psychological vulnerabilities. With a plotless narrative, the novel moves along mainly in the characters’ consciousness, addressing a journey of self-discovery and death. Woolf is masterful in crafting stories that address the nature of time in personal experiences.

In her novels, she presents multiple interwoven stories and Mrs Dalloway is no exception. Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party that she is planning to host the same evening. The story of the mentally damaged war veteran, S.W. Smith, is particularly striking in both — the novel and the film.

The film version of Mrs Dalloway (1997) bears the mark of three other women: Eileen Atkins, Marleen Gorris and Vanessa Redgrave. As Vanessa Redgrave, who plays the titular role, is more well-known to movie watchers, a word about Eileen Atkins and Marleen Gorris is in order here.

Atkins wrote a brilliant screenplay for Mrs Dalloway that Marleen Gorris directed. Dutch-born Gorris is also the first woman director to win an Oscar in the best foreign language film category, for Antonia’s Line in 1995.

Her films mostly investigate what it means to be a woman in a challenging world that men dominate. Mrs Dalloway is one of her best movies, though it remains underrated, as Marleen Gorris herself acknowledged.

Vanessa Redgrave depicts Mrs Dalloway as a disillusioned socialite, whose mood fluctuates between delight and depression. Her suppressed symptoms of depression are visible throughout the film. She appears to question — and at times regret — the choices she has made. Her memories haunt her, as she reflects on the life she could have lived with another man, whom she rejected for a dull but more stable person, who becomes a member of parliament.

But perhaps the most crucial character in the film is that of Smith who, in an earlier scene, watches his friend get blown up in the ‘no-man’s land’ of the trenches in France. Five years down the line, he still suffers from ‘shell shock’ and has a panic attack outside a shop where Mrs Dalloway pauses. Nearly all characters realise and suggest that World War One unleashed horrors that keep poisoning their lives.

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR AND THE ATOM BOMB

While the film Mrs Dalloway is indebted to four women: Eileen Atkins (screenplay), Virginia Woolf (novel), Marleen Gorris (director) and Vanessa Redgrave (actor), the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) has the mark of another two women: Marguerite Duras as the writer and Emmanuelle Riva as the main female lead.

Hiroshima Mon Amour, too, deals with memory and its insufficiency and treacherousness in the aftermath of a major war. In both movies, the women want to retain what they should, but their hopes appear to be fake and forced. The director of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alan Resnais, beautifully crafts a movie from the screenplay by Marguerite Duras.

Hiroshima Mon Amour is one of the best movies of the French New Wave, with an atmosphere that is both foreboding and strange. It is a tame movie, in which a woman recounts her memories of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. There are newsreels and footage of victims, protests against war and memorials in the post-war Hiroshima.

As opposed to Mrs Dalloway, which shows London five years after WWI, Resnais’s movie presents Hiroshima 14 years after the first atomic bomb hit it in 1945. While Mrs Dalloway is plotless, Hiroshima Mon Amour also defies any prior narrative structure.

The French novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras opened her eyes in 1914, the year WWI started; and as Virginia Woolf had observed WWI, Duras was an eyewitness to WWII.

Like Mrs Dalloway, Hiroshima Mon Amour also lacks any real story. There are two accidental lovers: a French actress visiting Hiroshima and a Japanese architect-cum-businessman drawn into a two-night affair with her. It becomes a sad and sensual affair, as the love between the two revolves around a film on peace. While exploring the influence of war on both French and Japanese culture, the conflict between the inhumanity of war and the human side of love stuns you in this brilliant film.

This documentary-style film recollects the memories of the Japanese man who fought for his country in WWII, whereas the French woman recalls her days in Nevers, France, when she madly fell in love with a German soldier, who would only come to die in her arms.

Fourteen years after the war, her memories deeply unsettle her, as she unexpectedly recounts those powerful feelings of longing and love that have disappeared from her life, as they did from the life of Mrs Dalloway. Profoundly painful memories mesmerise the viewers in this movie, as emotions erupt at a slow pace.

SOPHIE’S CHOICE AND AUSCHWITZ

Alan Pakula — who in 1962 had produced To Kill a Mockingbird and received a nomination for best picture — directed Sophie’s Choice 20 years later, in which Meryl Streep snatched the Oscar for best actress. Sophie’s Choice stars Meryl Streep as Zofia (Sophie), a Polish immigrant to America, with highly discomforting memories from her dark past, before and during WWII.

While Mrs Dalloway made her choice to marry a dull person for the sake of his high status in society, and the unnamed French actress chooses to love a soldier from the Nazi occupying force in France, the film Sophie’s Choice is about an extremely hard decision a mother has to make.

In this film, Sophie has to grapple with her memories as a Holocaust survivor and flashbacks reveal her harrowing story from Auschwitz. After the war, she lives in America with a Jewish man, having a fragile mental state.

Like the other two films, essentially Sophie’s Choice is also about a woman struggling with her past and regretting the choices she made, or had to make. In Sophie’s case, the choice becomes apparent only at the end of the movie, when she reveals to her young lover what she went through under the Nazi occupation of Poland.

When she arrives in Auschwitz, a Nazi officer forces her to choose which one of her children would go to the gas chamber and die. In the beginning, the movie is slow and at times tedious, but as it progresses and more of her story becomes known, the film grabs its audience.

In the final minutes of the film, the harrowing scenes of the concentration camp move you to tears. Sophie has a tough choice to make and, if she fails to choose, both of her children would lose their lives. In utter desperation, she chooses her son to live with her, while reluctantly allowing her daughter Eva to go to the gas chamber.

The three films we have just discussed have a common streak of memories and regrets, of choices and their aftermaths, and of the devastating impact the war has on women.

While the American, Dutch, English, French and the Japanese have all contributed to these films, now, in the face of the death and destruction in Gaza, hardly any developed country is inclined to make such moving films about the children and women in Gaza.

The utter destruction and humiliation that has become the fate of Palestinians is in no way less regrettable than the holocausts in Europe and Japan.

The writer is a columnist, educator, and film critic.
He can be contacted at
mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk.
X: @NaazirMahmood

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 5th, 2024