It's August, the summer of 1957. We are in Hiroshima.
A French woman in her 30s is in the city. She came to act in a film about the Peace. The Story begins the day before this woman returns to France, the film she was acting in is more or less done. There's just one scene left to shoot.
It's the day before her return to France that this french woman, who will never be named in the film — this anonymous woman — will meet a Japanese man (engineer, or architect ), and that they will have between them a very short love affair. The conditions in which they met will never be made clear in the film. Because that's not the question. People meet each other all over the world. What matters is what follows these everyday encounters.
This couple of chance, we don't see them at the start of the film. Not her. Not him. We see in their place mutilated corpses. At head height, or hip height — shifting — in the grip of Love, or of Agony — and covered up successively by cinders, by dew, by atomic death — and by the sweat of accomplished love.
It's only little by little that from these shapeless, anonymous bodies, we see theirs emerge.
They're in bed, in a hotel room. They are naked. Bodies smooth. Intact. What are they talking about? HIROSHIMA. She tells him that she saw everything at HIROSHIMA. We see what she saw. It's horrible. Meanwhile his voice, contrary, accuses the images of being false, and he replies, impersonal, intolerable, that she saw nothing at HIROSHIMA.
Their first words will therefore be allegorical. This will be, in sum, an operatic exchange. It's impossible to speak of HIROSHIMA. All that one can do is speak of the impossibility of speaking of HIROSHIMA. The knowledge of Hiroshima being posed a priori as an exemplary lure for the mind.
This start, this parade of the already infamous horrors of HIROSHIMA, evoked in a hotel bed, during an adulterous one night stand, this sacrilegious evocation, is purposeful. One can speak of HIROSHIMA anywhere, even in a hotel bed, in the course of chance love, adulterous love. The bodies of the two heroes, truly enamored, remind us of this. That which is really sacrilegious, if sacrilege there is, is HIROSHIMA itself. There’s no need to be a hypocrite and shift the question.
Despite how little he has been shown of the Hiroshima Monument, these miserable vestiges of a Monument of Emptiness, the viewer should leave this evocation cleaned of his prejudices and ready to accept all that he will be told of our two heroes.
Here they are; back to their story.
A banal story, a story that plays out every day, thousands of times. The Japanese man is married, he has two children. The French woman is too, and she also has two children. They’re living a one night fling.
But where? HIROSHIMA.
This entanglement, so banal, so quotidian, takes place in the world’s most difficult to imagine city : HIROSHIMA. There are no “givens” in HIROSHIMA. A peculiar halo surrounds every action, every word, in a sense that supplements their literal one. And there is one of the major goals of the film, to finish with the description of that horror by horror, because it is done by the Japanese themselves. But to revive the horror of these ashes in writing them on a love that will be, forcibly, special and “astonishing”. And which we will believe more than if it had been produced anywhere else in the world, in a place that death had not conserved.
Between two beings geographically, philosophically, historically, racially, etc. separated as much as it is possible to be, HIROSHIMA will be the common ground (perhaps the only one in the world) where the universal constants of eroticism, love, and unhappiness will appear beneath an implacable light. Everywhere except for HIROSHIMA, artifice is required. In HIROSHIMA it cannot exist under pain of, once more, being rejected.