In Hiroshima, 14 years after the atomic bomb was dropped, to make an international peace film where she plays a nurse, married French actress (Emmanuelle Riva, her first credited role) has a fling with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). In her hotel room, in the aptly named New Hiroshima, the nameless lovers make love, embrace, explore how the war altered their lives and what Hiroshima means to them. She leaves to finish filming and he can’t get her out of his mind, so he visits her on the set. That in a few hours she’s set to return to Paris and he has failed to convince her to stay on longer upsets him greatly, as he knows it’s likely that he will never see her again and she has greatly touched him. While having their last drink together she tells him of her humiliating unforgettable experience in occupied France, in her hometown of Nevers, a place she has never returned to after the war, where after the liberation and the death of her German soldier boyfriend by partisans she was marched through the streets of Nevers and disowned by her disgraced pharmacist father. She tells of the German being her first love, and how miserable everything became for her at the war’s end when she found herself isolated. Her melancholy connects with the architect’s wartime experience, where 200,000 died and eighty thousand were wounded in just a few seconds from the bomb that virtually ended the war.