At the start of Paris Memories, Alice Winocour’s thoughtful drama about coping with trauma in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, Mia (Virginie Efira) drops a water glass. It smashes into fragments that Mia, sighing with annoyance, collects and discards. It’s a seemingly banal moment, given a slight sense of unease by the evocative choice of music – Arvo Pärt’s pensive Fratres for strings and percussion – but it foreshadows Mia’s own fate. A stylish, self-assured translator who is fluent in Russian, she finds herself completely broken by the experience of being caught in a terrorist attack on a busy Paris brasserie. Three months after the event, she starts the process of piecing together her shattered memories of the attack, even as she comes to realise that some elements of her life are beyond repair.
There’s a sense that, having survived something as horrific as a mass shooting, fortysomething Mia is bent into a shape that no longer quite fits into her old world – a theme that has parallels with combat veteran dramas such as the impressive 2010 British indie In Our Name and the recent Jennifer Lawrence picture Causeway. Reconnecting with well-meaning friends to celebrate her partner’s birthday, Mia viscerally recoils from the candle-adorned cake – it opens a door to a buried recollection of the attack – and instead hides from her guests in the bathroom with her cat. Her partner, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), is sympathetic up to a point, but he has his own layers of guilt to process about leaving Mia alone that fateful evening, and his reasons for doing so.
