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.
Inexorably, Mia is drawn back to the restaurant where, she discovers, fellow survivors – including Benoît Magimel’s charismatic Thomas – and bereaved relatives have set up a weekly support group. Her need to recover the lost memories of the event becomes more urgent when a furious fellow survivor confronts her, suggesting that Mia’s actions that evening might have cost the lives of others.
It’s an empathic, unexpectedly hopeful take on trauma from Winocour, who is best known as the writer-director of Proxima and the co-writer of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated Turkish drama Mustang. Stéphane Fontaine’s fluid camera captures the overwhelming, almost abstract experience of the attack from Mia’s point of view, face pressed to the floor of the restaurant, her eye line restricted to the strolling feet of a gunman, the prone bodies of fellow diners and the glass of shattered champagne flutes. But the film also astutely pinpoints the kind of tiny details that bury themselves like shrapnel in the subconscious – the necklace of a woman; a fleeting moment of eye contact and shared amusement; the fretful, ridiculous worry about a half-eaten pot of yoghurt left in the fridge, perhaps now indefinitely. This last detail is drawn from real life. Winocour’s brother is a survivor of the Bataclan attack – one of a series of coordinated terrorist assaults on targets, including cafes, restaurants and the concert venue, around Paris on 13 November 2015. He later shared with her the fact that anxiety about the contents of his fridge loomed disproportionately large as he hid from the killers.
Although the impact of an atrocity such as the Bataclan attack is a shared, collective trauma on a national level, Winocour is at pains to point out that every experience is unique. In one of the more unwieldy elements of the picture, a brief segue shows an Australian tourist talking to camera, sharing his memories of a connection with a waitress as they lay bleeding together in fearful uncertainty. But ultimately the idea of connection – the comforting touch of strangers’ hands is a motif that recurs – rather than destruction is a central message of the film. One character describes it as “the diamond in trauma” – the unexpected positive that can come from enduring an experience so horrific.
It’s an idea that may seem trite and reductive of the suffering triggered by the attack were it not for the casting. Belgian-born Efira, who won a César for her performance in the film, is an actor of rare warmth. Even at her most broken, her Mia is a dynamic presence, outward-looking and attuned to the people around her. The spark between her and Thomas is way more than a case of matching scars – it’s a thrill of recognition. But most potent of all is a moment of closure: a searing, wordless locking of eyes with a fellow survivor near the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Efira packs so many layers of conflicting emotions into her expression that it almost hurts to watch her.
