Paris Memories review – soulful portrait of a terrorist attack survivor – The Guardian
At the beginning of Paris Reminiscences, Alice Winocour’s considerate drama about dealing with trauma within the aftermath of a terrorist assault, Mia (Virginie Efira) drops a water glass. It smashes into fragments that Mia, sighing with annoyance, collects and discards. It’s a seemingly banal second, given a slight sense of unease by the evocative selection of music – Arvo Pärt’s pensive Fratres for strings and percussion – nevertheless it foreshadows Mia’s personal destiny. A trendy, confident translator who’s fluent in Russian, she finds herself utterly damaged by the expertise of being caught in a terrorist assault on a busy Paris brasserie. Three months after the occasion, she begins the method of piecing collectively her shattered recollections of the assault, whilst she comes to understand that some components of her life are past restore.
There’s a way that, having survived one thing as horrific as a mass capturing, fortysomething Mia is bent right into a form that not fairly matches into her previous world – a theme that has parallels with fight veteran dramas such because the spectacular 2010 British indie In Our Identify and the latest Jennifer Lawrence image Causeway. Reconnecting with well-meaning pals to have fun her associate’s birthday, Mia viscerally recoils from the candle-adorned cake – it opens a door to a buried recollection of the assault – and as a substitute hides from her friends within the rest room together with her cat. Her associate, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), is sympathetic up to some extent, however he has his personal layers of guilt to course of about leaving Mia alone that fateful night, and his causes for doing so.
Inexorably, Mia is drawn again to the restaurant the place, she discovers, fellow survivors – together with Benoît Magimel’s charismatic Thomas – and bereaved family members have arrange a weekly assist group. Her have to recuperate the misplaced recollections of the occasion turns into extra pressing when a livid fellow survivor confronts her, suggesting that Mia’s actions that night might need value the lives of others.
It’s an empathic, unexpectedly hopeful tackle trauma from Winocour, who’s finest referred to as the writer-director ofProximaand the co-writer of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated Turkish drama Mustang. Stéphane Fontaine’s fluid digital camera captures the overwhelming, nearly summary expertise of the assault from Mia’s perspective, face pressed to the ground of the restaurant, her eye line restricted to the strolling ft of a gunman, the inclined our bodies of fellow diners and the glass of shattered champagne flutes. However the movie additionally astutely pinpoints the form of tiny particulars that bury themselves like shrapnel within the unconscious – the necklace of a lady; a fleeting second of eye contact and shared amusement; the fretful, ridiculous fear a couple of half-eaten pot of yoghurt left within the fridge, maybe now indefinitely. This final element is drawn from actual life. Winocour’s brother is a survivor of the Bataclan assault – one in all a collection of coordinated terrorist assaults on targets, together with cafes, eating places and the live performance venue, round Paris on 13 November 2015. He later shared together with her the truth that nervousness concerning the contents of his fridge loomed disproportionately giant as he hid from the killers.
Though the affect of an atrocity such because the Bataclan assault is a shared, collective trauma on a nationwide stage, Winocour is at pains to level out that each expertise is exclusive. In one of many extra unwieldy components of the image, a quick segue exhibits an Australian vacationer speaking to digital camera, sharing his recollections of a reference to a waitress as they lay bleeding collectively in fearful uncertainty. However in the end the concept of connection – the comforting contact of strangers’ palms is a motif that recurs – slightly than destruction is a central message of the movie. One character describes it as “the diamond in trauma” – the surprising constructive that may come from enduring an expertise so horrific.
It’s an thought which will appear trite and reductive of the struggling triggered by the assault have been it not for the casting. Belgian-born Efira, who received a César for her efficiency within the movie, is an actor of uncommon heat. Even at her most damaged, her Mia is a dynamic presence, outward-looking and attuned to the individuals round her. The spark between her and Thomas is far more than a case of matching scars – it’s a thrill of recognition. However most potent of all is a second of closure: a searing, wordless locking of eyes with a fellow survivor close to the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Efira packs so many layers of conflicting feelings into her expression that it nearly hurts to look at her.
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