Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais (1959)

A French actress in her thirties (“She”) comes to Hiroshima in August 1959 to play a role in a film about peace. The day before her departure, she meets a Japanese man (“He”) with whom she spends the night making love in her hotel room. While they make love, she relates her visit to the Hiroshima museum whose theme is the catastrophic consequences of the atomic bomb which destroyed the city, her visit to the hospital where the victims continue to receive care, and the documentary films she has seen simulating the event.

The following day, the Japanese man manages to find the French woman at the shooting location and takes her to his home, where they again make love. The affair with the Japanese man awakens the deeply repressed memory of a love affair she had had with a German soldier during the Nazi Occupation, when she was a young girl, in Nevers, France. The German soldier was shot dead the day before the city was liberated; the girl, disgraced, her head shaven in public, sinks into madness.

She tells the whole story to the Japanese lover, partly in his home, partly in a tearoom, the scenes from her past alternating on the screen with returns to the present. Afterwards she wanders through the streets of Hiroshima, returns to her hotel room for a moment, then goes out again into the night, her thoughts oscillating constantly between Nevers and Hiroshima. She is followed in the street for a while by the Japanese man, who tries to persuade her to stay a few days longer with him in Hiroshima. She sits a moment at the train station, then at a café — where she is approached by another Japanese man — before returning to her hotel room, where her Japanese lover quickly reappears.

The film ends in the French woman’s room, both characters anguished by the thought of their love affair fading from memory, with a final unresolved question. He: “Perhaps it is possible you will stay…”. She: “You know very well; that is even more impossible than separating.