In an early assessment of the French New Wave in Film Quarterly, Noel Burch called Une Simple Histoire "such a thoroughly revolutionary film that not only does it defy comparison with any postwar French film, but I doubt that any single film in the history of cinema has ever attempted such an immense forward leap. It is hard to know where to begin an examination of this film, outwardly so simple and inwardly so complex. The story on which it is built is slender indeed: a woman has left her native provincial city and arrives in Paris with her little girl; in her purse is a small, precise sum of money; as the days go by, the money dwindles; the woman is unable to find work, has great difficulty in finding a hotel room and when she finally has found one, her money runs out; she and her little girl spend the night in an empty lot, and the next day they are taken in by a kindly woman whose apartment overlooks the lot in question. What could be simpler, or more neorealistic?.... In his treatment of it, however, Hanoun situates himself at the opposite pole from neorealism...." Through an intricate combination of dialogue and first-person commentary by the protagonist, Hanoun creates what Burch calls "a kind of three-dimensional word-space," in which past and present coincide and conflict.