In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) is a French actress on location in Hiroshima, where she meets Lui (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect. She is married with children, and he is married too, but they have sex anyway, because they both cheat on their spouses on a regular basis. After a single night, they fall madly in love with each other, convinced that the sex they had was deep and meaningful, so deep and meaningful, in fact, that when they cheat on their respective spouses with other paramours in the future, as they have every intention of so doing, they think that it will never be as good as what they have with each other right now. Of course, if they were free to marry, they would probably be cheating on each other in a couple years too, but that either does not seem to occur to them, or it occurs to them, but they don’t care, because they are the kind of people who think they are entitled to cheat, because it is so deep and meaningful when they do.

Although the movie is set in Hiroshima, where reference is naturally made to the atom bomb, this proves to be nothing more than a way of providing an excuse for Elle to talk about what she was doing in France when the bomb went off. From there she eventually tells about how she loved a German soldier, who was killed by a sniper, and how she was ostracized for having sex with him, causing her to have a nervous breakdown. She thinks that German soldier was the great love of her life, but given the kind of woman she is, we know that she would have been cheating on him in no time.

Since the movie is set in Hiroshima, and since Lui is a Japanese citizen, you might think Elle’s story about how she suffered so much during the war would be matched by a story from Lui about his experience during that period. Nope. All we get is that he was in the army. Well, after all, this is a French movie and not a Japanese movie, so it is only the French experience that the movie deems worthy of consideration.

Not that it matters, because these two people and their exaggerated sense of importance about their sex life are not worthy of consideration in any event.