French film-maker Alice Winocour’s brother was inside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in November 2015; in interviews she has talked about texting him while he hid. He survived the massacre, and now she has made a drama about a fictional terrorist attack on Paris. It’s not about the bloodshed or war zone carnage; her film is a kind of psychological detective tale, following a survivor as she tries to piece together her memories of what happened on the night. It’s a measured, quietly powerful film with a performance from Virginie Efira that seems almost telepathic at times; in scenes where she doesn’t say a word, barely twitching a muscle in her face, yet somehow you know what she’s feeling.
Efira plays Mia, a no-nonsense journalist and translator in her 40s, partner, no kids. It’s bad luck on a grand scale that she’s in the restaurant targeted by terrorists. Riding her motorbike home late, the skies open; time slows as she ducks into the restaurant to sit out the downpour, orders a glass of wine, then a gun fires. Winocour films the attack mostly from Mia’s perspective, flat on her stomach lying on the ground. Like her, all we really see is the killer’s feet. It’s the sound design – breaking glass and terror – that makes it unbearable.
The film is mostly set three months later, when Mia’s memory is a blanket of holes. She joins a community of survivors where a woman angrily accuses her of barricading herself in a toilet cubicle during the attack – saving herself, leaving others to die. Mia doesn’t want to believe she could have done this, but how can she be sure? So, this story becomes stitched into her narrative of the night; she relives it in her head and it becomes memory.
The film’s actual title – in French – is Revoir Paris: To See Paris Again. The point is that Mia cannot return to her old life – her brain has been rewired, she’s not the same person. Like other survivors she’s desperate to find a stranger she does remember from the attack: a man she held hands with in a cupboard. He’s a young Senegalese chef (a slight role, played beautifully by Amadou Mbow) who has vanished – either dead, or dodging authorities. The movie gets a bit conventional as Mia falls for another survivor – funny, handsome-from-a-certain-angle Thomas (Benoît Magimel). It’s a bit of an ordinary ending to such a deep-feeling film, made with tremendous care.
• Paris Memories is released on 4 August in UK cinemas, and in Australia on 3 November.
