In this Nouvelle Vague classic, a Japanese man and a French woman come together sexually, wordlessly, and at a finite moment of the present: he is his past and she is her past, and for script author Marguerite Duras, there is something irreducible about the separateness of two individuals that sex can transcend fleetingly, but that makes no other communion really possible. One does not have to accept this logic to admire Alain Resnais' skill and virtuosity in illustrating the argument from the first sexual encounter to the final declaration of separation, or his intelligent and tasteful development of the film's pacifist sub-theme.