Revoir Paris (2022): “A Diamond in Trauma”

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

Night Shift (2020)

If noir is about ambiguity, ambivalence, and personal anguish, Night Shift certainly qualifies. The film addresses global issues on a small scale, through the interactions of its four main characters. Asomidin Tohirov is a prisoner who is scheduled for deportation to his home country of Tajikistan. His background is never fully explained, but it appears that he is an illegal immigrant seeking asylum in France who has overstayed some predetermined time limit. Three police officers—Virginie, Erik, and Aristide—are given the task of taking Tohirov to the airport. Title cards identify each officer by first name only, and viewers are given brief glimpses into their personal and work lives.

(This article about Night Shift contains almost all the spoilers.)

Virginie starts her day with her husband and her eighteen-month-old baby boy. Before reporting for work, Virginie goes to an appointment to schedule an abortion. When she starts her workday, she is in the locker room changing into her uniform, and as she does so, her demeanor seems to shift: She is taking on her role of an officer. Virginie goes to a break room, where one of the officers there, Aristide, calls her Miss Norway. She continues through the room to a corridor. Another officer, Erik, asks her to accompany him: He is taking a battered woman back to her home to retrieve her belongings.

En route to the woman’s home, the woman starts crying in the backseat of the police car. Virginie tries to reassure her. At the battered woman’s home, the husband harasses Virginie, and Erik restrains him. The wife starts crying again and asks the officers to leave. Virginie writes her incident report back at the police station. Aristide interrupts her to ask her out to lunch at their usual kebab place, but she refuses.

The next police task is a public brawl between several civilians, which the police, including Virginie and Aristide, break up. After many of the civilians are arrested, restrained, and on their way to police vans, Virginie tells Aristide that she is pregnant with his child. In a flashback, viewers see how the two (Virginie and Aristide) first became attracted to one another during a night out with other police officers.

Back again at the police station, Hervé, one of the commanding officers, asks for volunteers to escort a prisoner to the airport for deportation. The so-called Escort Crew is unavailable because its members are fighting a prison fire. Erik agrees to go when asked. Virginie volunteers before being asked. Aristide joins at the last minute when he sees Virginie is going; he had originally refused the job.

When Erik’s day starts, viewers learn that he is married and does not have any children. His wife tells him that she would take things out on them, too, if they had had any. They argue; their marriage is troubled. Viewers see the police activity of the morning from Erik’s perspective, including the battered wife and the call for volunteers to escort the prisoner to the airport.

Viewers also see Erik’s interactions with Aristide because they are partners. They answer a call to help a woman and her child, but there is nothing that they can do because the child is dead. The woman claims that she never meant to hurt him and that she is not a bad mother.

Aristide’s day starts with a zoom call to his grandmother, who is hospitalized in his home country of Senegal. On his way to work, Aristide thinks of the night he and Virginie first were attracted to one another. His flashback continues with more details of that night out.

In this way, viewers learn about the events of the day from the perspective of each of the three police officers. Viewers learn about Tohirov and the police officers through their interactions and their conversations, and sometimes through flashbacks. Tohirov does not talk because he doesn’t understand or speak French. Everything viewers learn about him is through the three police officers: Virginie, Erik, and Aristide.

Virginie did not realize that their assignment involves taking a foreigner to the airport for deportation. She learns this from an offhand comment by Aristide as he drives the police transport van. She has another flashback showing the beginning of her affair with Aristide. They arrive at the prison to find it is the one on fire. As Virginie leads Tohirov out of the prison to the transport vehicle, a woman tries to stop them. She says that they appealed Tohirov’s case to the European Court for Human Rights, that the court is ruling soon, and that Tohirov will be killed on his return to his home country of Tajikistan.

Virginie knows nothing about the prisoner’s circumstances, but she sits in the backseat with him and has his sealed dossier on her lap. The seal on the dossier is minimal, so she opens it and reads it, and she is alarmed by what she reads. It seems the woman who tried to stop her was right. In addition, Tohirov suffered physical abuse and torture. Virginie reads the details to the others, and she becomes increasingly concerned about the task they have set out to do. When the prisoner starts crying, she takes off his handcuffs. Erik is infuriated by her attitude and her actions.

Virginie is the character who makes the argument that they should help the prisoner rather than simply follow the rules of proper police conduct. In a flashback during this sequence, Aristide and Virginie are in bed, and he talks of his grandmother, who raised him. Virginie’s flashbacks seem to be a way for her to reconcile what she knows about Aristide, what she found attractive about him, and his current attitude toward their prisoner. She seems to be the only one touched by the prisoner’s circumstances.

Aristide and Virginie stop to get a bite to eat and talk. Erik and Tohirov wait in the transport vehicle. While they are eating, Aristide begins to see Virginie’s point of view and understand her concerns. In the transport vehicle, Erik talks to Tohirov. He lays out the reasons why they should do their jobs, but Virginie and Aristide are not there to hear him, and Tohirov doesn’t understand. Erik doesn’t know why Tohirov is being sent back to Tajikistan, but he also doesn’t know what Tohirov is doing in France and his isn’t entirely convinced about his reasons for coming to the country in the first place. He acknowledges out loud that Tohirov could be a terrorist. Erik ends by saying, “I don’t understand. I understand nothing.” Aristide eventually comes around to Virginie’s way of thinking. Erik is still infuriated, but he finally accedes to their wishes and agrees not to stand in their way. He has given the reasons why they should follow police procedure, in contrast to Virginie.

They leave the prisoner, without handcuffs, alone in the transport vehicle in the woods, but he won’t leave the vehicle. Even when they push him out, Tohirov won’t leave. He probably doesn’t understand what they are trying to do, doesn’t understand what they want for him, and/or doesn’t know where to go. Erik says that Tohirov probably thinks they will try to kill him.

By now the tension is rising among the three police officers. They argue, and Aristide and Erik challenge one another. Virginie convinces everyone to get back into the vehicle, and they continue to the airport. No one is happy about the task, but they continue anyway. Erik is relieved to be getting it over with and staying out of trouble. He doesn’t want any marks on his service record because it is clean. They continue to the airport in silence and drop off the prisoner when they arrive.

After Tohirov is frisked by two new police officers, he is taken to the airport transport bus. Before the officers can load him in, he puts up a fight and starts screaming. Virginie, Erik, and Aristide watch Tohirov in still silence. As the three police officers start the drive out of the airport, Virginie starts to feel sick. Aristide asks her if she is alright, and she tells him she needs some air. In a few seconds, she sees, in her mind’s eye, Tohirov being dragged into the airport vehicle, and she starts running back to the terminal.

Aristide drives after her, then follows her on foot into the terminal and onto the plane. They talk first to the pilot, then tell the officers escorting Tohirov that he is a dangerous man. They demand to take the prisoner back. The escorting officers protest, but the pilot doesn’t want trouble in the air. He agrees to let the prisoner return to the ground.

During this scene, the camera focuses on Tohirov. He doesn’t understand at first. Everyone’s voices become muted to demonstrate his lack of understanding. But when Virginie makes eye contact with him, he understands finally that they are trying to help him.

On their way back to the station, Aristide thanks Erik for calming the customs officials down, but Erik is worried about the consequences of their actions. They all agree, including Erik, to include in their report that the prisoner was uncooperative, but Erik still fears the consequences. He has twenty years of service and not one blemish on his record—until now. Virginie, Erik, and Aristide have bought more time for Tohirov, but there is no guarantee that the European Court for Human Rights will make its decision in time to avoid another attempt to deport Tohirov. And I can’t help but think that calling him “dangerous” and “uncooperative” will hurt his chances.

The three officers continue with their respective days. Erik visits the seashore, where he looks happy for the first time in the film. Aristide goes to the clinic with Virginie. They walk out and down the street together, hand in hand. All three of them have no resolution to the day’s activities. They do not know what will become of Tohirov, who is presented as one of the most important decisions they faced that day. But they are peace with themselves, and that is a day that ends well.

Night Shift is called Police in France. It is based on a French novel, also called Police, by Hugo Boris. I cannot understand why the title was changed for English-language audiences. The three main characters, the police officers, are not really working a night shift; they have volunteered for an extra assignment, with overtime, that lasts until the assignment is finished. There is no time limit or shift work involved. I wish the distributors stuck with the original title: It would have made more sense.

But this is hardly a major complaint. The film takes its time explaining the stories of the officers and their prisoner. We know what the officers are facing at home and on the job, and we understand that the prisoner is really caught in an unfortunate situation created mostly by government red tape, at least as far as the film’s plot is concerned, and not by anything that he has done. Viewers are drawn into the story via the four main characters (the police officers and their prisoner), and they see the anguish, anger, and fear that each character experiences to varying degrees. Even though it takes place in France, the story could stand in for all the immigration stories taking place across the United States today, in 2025.

What I especially enjoyed about the film was its lack of a tidy ending. It resolves something about each of the four strands of the plot. Viewers learn that Tohirov is taken off the plane and returned to French custody, but we never learn if the European Court for Human Rights rules in time to have any effect on the man’s future. His impossible dilemma is resolved, but maybe only for a day or two, as Erik rightly points out. Still, it’s a relief to know that Virginie accomplished what she set out to do after she opened Tohirov’s file in the transport vehicle. Everything else is left to fate, which is one of the hallmarks of noir, old and new.

February 23, 2020 (Berlin), September 2, 2020 (France, Belgium), release dates  •  Directed by Anne Fontaine  •  Screenplay by Claire Barré  •  Based on the novel Police by Hugo Boris  •  Music by Guillaume Clément  •  Edited by Fabrice Rounaud  •  Cinematography by Yves Angelo

Omar Sy as Aristide  •  Virginie Efira as Virginie  •  Grégory Gadebois as Erik  •  Payman Maadi as Asomidin Tohirov  •  Aurore Broutin as the psychologist  •  Thierry Levaret as Hervé  •  Cécile Rebboah as the social worker  •  Anne-Pascale Clairembourg as Martine  •  Cédric Vieira as Virginie’s husband  •  Tadrina Hocking as the gynecologist  •  Elisa Lasowski as Sonia  •  Emmanuel Barrouyer as the abusive husband

Distributed by StudioCanal, Athena Film  •  Produced by F Comme Film, Ciné@, StudioCanal, France 2 Cinéma, France 3 Cinéma, Korokoro, Scope Pictures