The title reflects the fate of this too-little-known film which won the Grand Prize at Cannes and the prestigious Pris Louis Delluc. Scripted by Duras, it was directed by Henri Colpi, the esteemed film editor best known for his work with Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour). Colpi's forte as editor is in giving the matrix of memory and desire an emotional register through form. The setting here is a bleak Parisian suburb in August, when anyone who is anyone has left for les vacances; our story concerns those who stay. The proprietress (Alida Valli) of a working-class bar is stunned when a tramp (Georges Wilson) walks in who is the image of her husband, deported and presumably killed by the Germans sixteen years earlier. The kind, gentlemanly stranger has lost his memory, clearly damaged by the war himself; he is a tabula rasa onto which she paints her longing. "(The film) is notable for modesty, sincerity, genuine warmth. It is never impelled to seem larger than life; it is never felt to be less than human." (Time)