MOVIE INFO- ROTTEN TOMATOES:
After an idyllic date night full of red wine and a late-night motorcycle ride home, Mia (Virginie Efira) stops at a Parisian bistro to take shelter from a downpour. Her reprieve is shattered when a gunman opens fire. Three months later, with a frustratingly hazy memory of the attack, Mia finds herself numbed and unable to resume her life. Her friends and partner seek something from her that she can no longer give. Determined to reconstruct the sequence of events and reestablish a sense of normalcy, Mia finds herself repeatedly returning to the bistro where the shooting happened. In the process, she forms bonds with fellow survivors, including wry banker Thomas (Benoît Magimel) and orphaned teenager Félicia (Nastya Golubeva). When she remembers that a stranger helped her make it through the attack, Mia resolves to find him, if only to make sure that he is alive. Revoir Paris is a moving meditation on grief, healing, and the importance of connections forged in tragedy.
Review :
When someone survives a terrorist attack, or even a horrific mass shooting, the past becomes a foreign country at war and memory become the land that lies in ruin. The survivor is left clutching vivid fragments that can only be glued together with time and group therapy with other survivors. This process is explored in the French drama Revoir Paris.
For the lead character, Mia (Virginie Efira) there is living with the grief, pain-pushing through to the next day. The trauma has changed her memory, shattered and destroyed it. She doesn’t know which story about the event is true. Which is a gaslight imposed by remorseful survivors. The story she thinks is herself has been shattered, and in a profound way, so has her self-identity. Without true memories she can really tell her authentic story.
The director, Alice Winocour turns this indecision into the ultimate existential mystery. Here, Mia is both the victim and detective. The audience is given a thread of certainty. The shootings are shown. They are also peripherally based on the November 13, 2015 Islamic extremists attacks that were international headlines- 130 killed, hundreds wounded in separate locations across Paris, the most horrific being at the Bataclan concert hall. Among the survivors and witnesses was Winocour’s own brother.
The attack is just the trauma event. The movie jumps forward three months later, after an unseen idyll with her mother. There is the need for the victim-detective to return to the scene of the crime. Establishing the sequence of events becomes Mia’s only imperative. She can’t escape it and it won’t leave her alone. Gradually after interviewing the surviving witnesses she is able to reconstruct the true story. The reveal that happens at the end of a mystery is now the true movie.
Winocour is both discreet and direct in how she handles the reveal. There is eerie foreshadowing straight out of horror movies. The visceral horror of the event is never really shown. She avoids gruesome spectacle. She prefers little mental shocks, psychological insights that come on like goosebumps.
Winocour uses all her directing tools: compressing the narrative, precise editing, an ecstatic score, pained expressions.
The complications are piled on- sometimes a little too neatly. The impromptu therapy group-CSI unit sifts the evidence, finds the witness with the crucial memory key and Mia is able to reclaim herself from the events horror. The result, Revoir Paris gains an emotional realism about what it truly means to be a survivor.
Revoir Paris gets a 3.5/5 or a B+. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime.
Credits:
Directed by Alice Winocour
Screenplay Alice Winocour
Jean-Stéphane Bron
Marcia Romano
Music Anna von Hausswolff
Main actors
Virginie Efira
Benoit Magimel
Dharamsala Production Companies
Darius Films
Country of production France
Genre Drama
Duration 105 minutes
Release 2023
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