Renais’s first feature film is greatly indebted to Marguerite Duras’s screenplay and is considered one of the finest films of the early French New Wave. Using a radically novel approach to expressing temporality through associative cuts that bridge the past and the present, Renais presents the subjective point of view of a French woman who, haunted by her past and the war and filming an historical recreation of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, falls in love with a Japanese man.