In a summer hotel in 1957, a bunch of men and women with obvious differences in skin color hug tightly on the bed, and the close-up dewdrops in the camera roll slightly over their bodies, and they come from the fiery desire and are about to evaporate by the fiery heat of the desire.
It was a brief love affair that took place in a foreign land. The woman in the story is an actress from France who came to Hiroshima to shoot a scene, and the man is a construction engineer who plays a prank on Japan. They fall in love at first sight in an encounter and then quickly fall in love. However, in this love affair between Pingshui and the desire to care about chaos, it evoked a memory that was difficult for her to look back. It was a memory of love, war and death. Fourteen years ago, on the eve of the end of World War II, the woman's hometown of Nievel was occupied by the Germans, and she fell in love with a German soldier in this war. This love affair was probably destined to be tragic from the start, because it itself violated the taboo of the state. The French woman and the German soldier secretly dated, and later they met to flee France together and get married. However, on the morning of their departure, the German soldiers, the lovers of the women, were shot and killed by the fighters of the French Resistance.
After that, Nevel was liberated overnight, but the woman was unable to extricate herself from the pain of losing her lover, and not only that, she was cut off her hair and kicked into a bald head as punishment for those who fell in love with the enemy country. Since then, the woman's feelings have been exhausted with the departure of the lover. That is, while her love was destroyed, Hiroshima was also destroyed by the atomic bomb. In an instant, the entire city was in ruins, beyond recognition, and the lives of the people of Hiroshima were completely destroyed.
More than ten years later, when the French woman came to Hiroshima to shoot a play, in the museum in Hiroshima, she saw the relics of the war being quietly displayed there, probably many people have forgotten the painful memories, the French woman is also, she even selectively, deliberately to forget, but at this moment, the war relics that were displayed, as well as the love with Japanese men, once again tore apart her dusty memories and wounds. So after a night of clouds and rain, the French woman decided to separate from the Japanese man, because she could not bear the torture of those years. She has to forget, she has to forget.
So there is a dialogue in the script:
Her: Like you, I'll forget.
Him: No, you don't forget.
Her: Like you, I have a good memory. But I will forget everything.
Him: No, you don't have a good memory.
Her: Like you, I've tried to fight oblivion to the best of my ability. Like you, I forgot everything. Like you, I used to long for an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stele.
It can be seen that the forgetting of French women is a kind of helpless forgetting, she said not "I forgot", but "I will forget". And the truth behind this sentence is that she has not forgotten, and she cannot really forget. For forgetting should not be a choice, but a natural occurrence. If you choose to forget, it will go in the opposite direction, no longer forgetting, but forgetting.
Duras wrote in the script, "It is doomed to be forgotten. Therefore, it is eternal (because it is maintained by forgetting itself). "How can we be eternal? Death or oblivion. So in love, we still don't expect to get eternity. Eternity will only bring you pain that cannot be lost.