I loved Revoir Paris. I must confess, however, that I have never heard anyone describe it as a noir. It does contain elements that are common to noir, going all the way back to its beginnings in the 1940s: murder, amnesia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These noir elements happen in a very different setting for Revoir Paris, a very modern one: a mass shooting. I decided to write about the film because it captures the noir feature of PTSD so well. And it is a great film.
This article about Revoir Paris contains many spoilers. It also discusses a film whose plot could be triggering for people suffering from PTSD. The director Alice Winocour based her fictional story on the experiences of her brother, who survived the November 2015 attacks in France when he was attending a concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris. Viewers will have to make their own decisions about seeing the film, but it is meant to be an homage to the human capacity to survive. Sara, a character in the film, a trauma survivor, and the organizer of a support group, tells Mia Loreau, another trauma survivor and the main character of Revoir Paris, that “a diamond in trauma” is a way to come to terms with tragedy and horror. In the midst of all the pain and suffering, there is still something good, something to hope for.
The film starts with a slow dolly of the camera toward the open door of a balcony in a Paris apartment. Mia Loreau waters plants on the balcony and then crosses the threshold to enter the apartment. The camera continues zooming in on the scene outside the balcony door, leaving everything about the apartment building behind and showcasing the neighborhood. Like the film’s title, it lets viewers know that Paris is as much a character in the story as the actors. In the kitchen, Mia gets ready for work as a Russian translator. Her partner, Vincent, a doctor, does the same. The day starts just as any other for them.
After work, Mia and Vincent go out for dinner. Vincent takes a phone call, and he returns to the table to tell Mia that he must go back to work. Mia is left to finish her meal on her own. She doesn’t return to her apartment right away because it starts pouring rain while she is driving her motorcycle home. To wait out the thunderstorm, she stops at L’Étoile d’Or for a drink. The brasserie is crowded, and she is seated at a table in a back room. Mia has a glass of wine and does some journal writing. Her fountain pen starts leaking, and she has to go to the restroom to wash her hands. She notices other patrons around her, in the restroom and in the dining room, including a man celebrating his birthday at a nearby table with a group of friends. He catches her eye. All these details become important later, when Mia’s memory comes back in pieces, and she must come to terms with her recovery.
Mia gets up to leave the restaurant and allows two other patrons to proceed before her. As they near the front door of the brasserie, the man and the woman are shot dead. Mia drops to the floor and tries to hide. From this spot, she can see the assassin enter the brasserie and methodically shoot random patrons, really anyone who is still moving. She plays dead to escape being shot, and when the assassin moves to another room in the brasserie, Mia starts crawling.
And then the screen goes black.
After a few seconds, the screen is filled with an overhead shot of La Place de la République at night. Viewers can see the streets coming together at this monument and traffic making its way around the traffic circle surrounding it. It is unclear at first whether Mia is still alive, but then her voice on the soundtrack explains that she cannot remember anything past the point when the screen goes black, when she is crawling on the floor of the brasserie. She continues talking over the shot of La Place de la République, which is another way to showcase the city of Paris. The film is about thirteen minutes long at this point, and the rest of it is devoted to Mia’s recovery and that of other survivors.
Mia is physically scarred from her injuries in the shooting. She tells her plastic surgeon that she wants to get her reconstructive surgery over with so that she can move on, but the surgeon tells her that they have to wait because a procedure now risks infection. During their brief conversation, Mia reveals that she is back in Paris for the first time after spending three months at her mother’s home recuperating. On her way home from the surgeon’s, Mia’s bus takes a chance detour past L’Étoile d’Or, and Mia disembarks to visit the brasserie. Perhaps she is ready to recapture her lost memories.
Mia’s friends and her partner Vincent don’t know what to say to her. They wonder when she will get back to her old self. In the meantime, she has flashbacks. Sometimes she sees the patrons from L’Étoile d’Or: they are silent, but they appear as though they are part of her life. Mia tells Vincent that people used to confide in her; now they hold back. They don’t know what to say. She tells Vincent that he treats her differently now, too, since the night of the shooting. It’s as if he is trying to be careful around her. Vincent insists that Mia is wrong, that what she says is not true, but she says that, yes, it is true.
Mia asks Vincent about the details of their dinner the evening of the shooting. Was it raining or not? He was called away to work, yes? What time was that? She wants to rebuild her memories, but it’s not a project that interests Vincent much. Viewers learn later that it’s not only the understandable gaps in his memory that makes him reticent. He is having an affair with a coworker, which was the reason for his leaving his dinner with Mia in the first place.
When Mia gets off the bus and stops at L’Étoile d’Or for the first time since the shooting, she learns about a trauma support group and meets other survivors of the same night. One is Thomas, who caught Mia’s eye the night of the shooting. He tells Mia that he remembers everything about that night. She eventually reaches out to him to help her. He is not so sure that remembering everything is such a good idea, but he tells her, “You can’t do it alone. It takes two or more to remember.”
Mia meets several other survivors, and all of them experience the pain of tragedy in their own way. Each one has a unique way of coping, and when I started listing their unique coping mechanisms, I began to think of them as the quirks of trauma. Here are a few examples:
◊ Mia takes a seat during her first trauma support group meeting at L’Étoile d’Or, and another attendee, Félicia, asks her to move because it is the same table where her parents were sitting when they were shot and killed. Later in the film, Félicia learns that her parents were in the middle of writing a postcard addressed to her, a postcard of the painting Water Lilies by Claude Monet, when they were killed. Félicia wants to see the original painting, one of the last things that her parents saw when they visited an art museum on the day that they died. She says that it will be “like saying goodbye to them.” Félicia cannot part with anyone unless she is on good terms with them because she knows now that anything can happen.
◊ Thomas is now claustrophobic. He cannot enter L’Étoile d’Or and thus cannot attend the trauma support group meetings. He connects with Mia by motioning to her from his position on the sidewalk outside the brasserie so that she can join him. He also suffers from survivor’s guilt. On the night of the shooting, he was at L’Étoile d’Or celebrating his birthday with coworkers. Two did not survive the shooting.
◊ Another survivor, Camille, confronts Mia and accuses her of saving only herself. Camille says that Mia had the chance to help others by letting them into the bathroom where she had locked herself in, but she did nothing. Later in the film, Camille finally admits to Mia that it was she herself who locked everyone out of the bathroom. She had constructed her own memories of that night because she had just lost her husband in the shooting and was so overpowered by grief that she couldn’t process what was happening to her.
◊ Some of Mia’s memories come back in the form of dreams, when she is asleep. Sometimes they flash before her while she is going about her daily life. Félicia tells Mia that sometimes she thinks that she sees her parents walking on the streets of Paris. Mia understands because she sees some of the victims, too, even though she knew no one in the brasserie the night of the shooting.
Mia’s relationship with her partner Vincent becomes more and more complicated the more she searches for a way to recover and come to terms with what she experienced. She moves out of their apartment into that of a friend’s near La Place de la République. She comes home one night to find Vincent waiting for her at her front door. He tells her that he doesn’t understand what she’s doing, why she won’t come home to the apartment that they share. He offers simplistic explanations: He thinks that she has found someone new or that she would rather be with her support group. He starts packing her things without her consent. Mia tells Vincent that he cannot help her, that she cannot go back to their old life. Vincent asks, “I have to watch you go crazy and do nothing?” He does not understand her feelings or what she is going through, and he does not understand that there is nothing that he can do.
When Mia meets Vincent again in the apartment they shared for a final goodbye, he tells her that she shouldn’t associate the shooting with him and that she wouldn’t leave him if they had had a child together. She tells him that it wouldn’t have changed anything. It was a decision that they had both made, and she doesn’t regret it. When they leave in his car, she asks him directly where he was the night of the shooting. Vincent admits that he was meeting someone that he is having an affair with. Mia and Vincent’s separation may have been inevitable, and Mia’s trauma perhaps hastened it.
Memories slowly come back to Mia, and her persistence, determination, and research pay off. She begins to recall that she hid in a closet with a young man, a chef at L’Étoile d’Or, who held her hand and reassured her. Her search for clues is a rather unconventional detective story, and it could be called another noir feature. The man that Mia is searching for is Assane, an illegal immigrant, which makes tracking him down very difficult. To find him, Mia must enter a world that is very much a part of Paris, but it wasn’t a part of Mia’s life before the shooting. Not many people in this world are willing to talk, but Mia finally gets answers from an employee who stayed employed at the brasserie after the shooting and from a handler who helps immigrants find work. Assane was a chef at the brasserie and happened to be looking for food ingredients in the basement when the shooting started. That chance event saved his life, but many of his friends died that night.
Mia finally finds Assane selling souvenirs near the Eiffel Tower. At first, he pretends that he doesn’t recognize her, but then he admits that he was the one who held her hand. They are happy to find out that both survived and are continuing with their lives. The meeting gives Mia, especially, a sense of closure. She and many of the other survivors feel a need to connect with the people they spent such harrowing moments with. Many offered comfort at a time when they feared for their lives.
The film is realistic in its treatment of recovery after trauma. The pace and timing were true to the subject, which is not often comfortable for survivors or those who care about them—or for viewers of a film. Some reviewers of the film did not like the long pauses, with the camera resting on characters’ faces and their portrayals of emotion, and the slow pace of the action. But the film does not have any fast action; it is not that type of film.
Virginie Efira, in the role of Mia Loreau, carries the film, and her performance is powerful. The actors in supporting roles also give great performances. I saw the film several times, and I was lost in the narrative every time.
The opening and closing credits appear in neon-blue type over a black background, which matches the blue tinge of Paris at night, when Mia often searches for peace and answers. The emphasis on the blue lights of the city works well, as does the soundtrack and sound design. The music is an original score that emphasizes the mood and pace of the narrative.
The DVD that I watched came with features that included interviews with the director, Alice Winocour, and the two lead actors, Virginie Efira and Benoît Magimel. All the features are worth a look to learn more about their creative processes and their approach to creating the story.
As I mentioned earlier, Winocour, based her fictional story on the experiences of her brother, who survived the November 2015 attacks in France when he was at the Bataclan theater in Paris. For more information about the November 2015 attacks in France and about the film, click on the links in the following list:
◊ Wikipedia: general information about the November 2015attacks in France.
◊ Moveable Fest: an interview with Winocour about the film.
◊ Film Review Daily: a review of Revoir Paris.
The English-language title for Revoir Paris is Paris Memories, a title that makes the film sound like a love story, a romantic comedy, and it is anything but. The French title literally means To Resee Paris. And I can understand that the literal translation might not have worked very well. Mia Loreau is indeed searching for her memories of a traumatic event, but I might have gone with something like Searching for Memories in Paris.
Revoir Paris captures the reality of life for Mia after she experiences a mass shooting. In her particular case, one could say that she might not have been living her life to the fullest before the trauma because it is only afterward that she faces some hard facts. For instance, she finally has the courage to confront her live-in boyfriend about his affair with one of his coworkers.
I hope Alice Winocour revisits the topic of Revoir Paris and creates another film about tragedy and PTSD. Maybe the topic deserves many films exploring the path to recovery, which takes a lot longer than the time frame suggested in Revoir Paris. I don’t think it was Winocour’s intent to suggest that such horror could be examined and resolved in a few months or in one film. So I do hope that she returns to the subject. I think that she would do great justice to the long-term effects of tragedy and PTSD.
May 21, 2022 (Cannes); September 7, 2022 (France); June 23 2023 (United States) release dates • Directed by Alice Winocour • Screenplay by Alice Winocour, Jean-Stéphane Bron, Marcia Romano • Original music by Anna Von Haussewolff • Edited by Julien Lacheray • Cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine
Virginie Efira as Mia Loreau • Benoît Magimel as Thomas • Grégoire Colin as Vincent • Maya Sansa as Sara • Amadou Mbow as Assane • Nastya Golubeva Carax as Félicia • Anne-Lise Heimburger as Camille • Sokem (aka Kemso) Ringuet as Hakim • Sofia Lesaffre as Nour • Dolores Chaplin as Estelle, Thomas’s wife • Clarisse Makundul Kyé as Essé • Zakaviya Gouran as the plastic surgeon • Johathan Turnbull as the waiter at L’Étoile d’Or
Distributed by Pathé • Produced by Dharamsala, Darius Films, Pathé, France 3 Cinéma
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