Tragedy destroys but maybe it can also heal. Paris Memories kicks off with a terrible terrorist attack in a Paris restaurant. A man, school-shooting style, wandering through the place and putting a bullet into everything that moves. It’s a grim and powerful opener directed with an eye for maximum shock by Alice Winocour, whose films usually focus on intangible emotion rather than concrete deed. You get both in these opening moments.
But once she’s made her opening statement, Winocour reverts to type. The film is about the aftermath rather than the event, with Virginie Efira playing one survivor who, amnesiac since that night, only returns to the scene of the atrocity by accident months later, after her bus is diverted and she finds herself right outside.
Inside, life goes on. The waiting staff bustle about. There is a support group for survivors, she learns from a waiter who is kind enough to tell her about it but seems slightly irritated that she’s there.
And so Mia fetches up at a meeting, and starts to put together fragments of that evening. The handsome guy (Benoît Magimel) who was giving her the eye but who is now having his shattered leg rebuilt in repeated operations. The angry woman who accuses Mia of having acted in a hideously selfish manner on the night in question – Mia cannot remember her any more than she can remember handsome guy. Most of all the flashes of a half memory of being in a confined space with a cook as the gunman picked off the stragglers, how she and he held hands and shared what they thought would be their last moments together. Where is he now? What was his name?
From these fragments Winocour builds a convincing psychological drama about a woman recovering from loss and about the bonds created between people by moments of intense experience.
And the bonds broken by intense experience. Mia has a partner, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a doctor who was on shift that evening and so wasn’t with Mia. This relationship is tested to destruction by the events of that night and by Mia’s realisation that the people she now feels close to are the people who also shared in her ordeal.
It’s another great performance by Virginie Efira, suddenly elected to the Juliette Binoche Society as a go-to actor for roles about chic middle-aged French women in left-field situations.
And like Huppert (still a member) or Deneuve (an emeritus position) she seems to be able to deliver whatever is required of her. Here, Mia is a wandering blank, with moments of lucid recall, endlessly sifting through the details of the evening. The fact that Mia is dressed throughout in jeans and leather motorbike jacket only emphasising how focused she’s become.
In other hands Mia’s quest might seem unhealthy but Winocour (who also wrote the story, based on her own brother’s experiences at the Bataclan terrorist attacks of November 2015) is more equivocal than that. She’s determined to find a positive. Violent disruption can also offer a chance to renew, if it can be seized.
It’s gently shot, by the versatile DP Stéphane Fontaine (who’s done everything from Rust and Bone, for Jacques Audiard to Elle for Paul Verhoeven) and there are a couple of wispy songs by Anna von Hausswolff which catch the emotionally tentative nature of the whole entreprise.
But the film’s power comes from Winocour’s balancing of the awful with the hopeful, and of the narratively unexceptional with moments of huge emotional release, which Mia’s encounters with handsome man and angry woman and her search for the elusive chef all provide.
“I have a scar,” she says to Thomas (handsome man’s name) towards the end as things move towards the intimate. “So do I,” he replies. And that’s is, in one exchange, what the film is about.
Revoir Paris aka Paris Memories – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
