ALICE WINOCOUR KNOWS what she’s doing. The French auteur’s latest film Revoir Paris is about trauma, specifically the trauma suffered by Mia (Virginie Efira), a journalist who survives a terrorist attack in a Paris bistro. The movie - currently playing NYC theaters under the comically generic English title Paris Memories - directly engages the ISIL attacks of November 13th, 2015, the most notorious of which took place during an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan nightclub. Ninety people were murdered there; Winocour’s brother Jérémie was among the survivors1. Another forty were murdered elsewhere in Paris that same night, some via suicide bombings. It remains the biggest and bloodiest terrorist attack coordinated on French soil, and Revoir Paris has been touted by some as an ode to the resilience of its titular city in the aftermath. Even if this framing is inevitable for commercial purposes, it’s wishful thinking, and I was skeptical that Winocour would deliver anything that could be interpreted as flag-waving propaganda.
The bulk of Revoir Paris takes place several months later, in which Mia is trying to put together the pieces of what actually happened - where she hid, and specifically the identity of a Black man who helped keep her calm by holding her hand - during the siege of the restaurant. She has, to use a contemporary phrase, “memory-holed” the attack; her body survived; her mind and spirit are still suffering. She is looking for a lightbulb moment which will make it all make sense. And because the tale is told from Mia’s perspective, Revoir Paris tightly restricts the attack within this fragmented memory museum. It’s a (mostly) narrative decision but it also spares the audience from historical pontification, ghoulish visions of the lead-up to the attack, crypto(?)-racist imagery of the perpetrators praying towards Mecca or we-are-all-connected exposition (ala Peter Berg’s disastrous reenactment of the Boston Marathon bombing, Patriots Day2) which would seem to imply the murders were a foregone or destined conclusion.
I very much admire the way Winocour refuses to assign ideological meaning to the attack, focusing on micros instead of macros. We never see the faces of the murderers. We never learn what warped cause they used to justify the killings. Mia is not a stand-in for the Republic at large. Added context would be extraneous for French viewers, but it also struck me that American ones unaware of the November 2015 massacres could understand Mia’s position without it, as 9/11 instructed all Americans to view themselves as presumptive victims of an international terror attack, even if death by car accident was likelier then, and death by homegrown mass shooting is likelier today. (It is a damning testament to our unwillingness to protect one another that such atrocities have become garden-variety. What happened to “Never Again”? My workplace - one of the most powerful arts institutions in the world - recently contracted a retired cop to hold a mandatory “Active Shooter Training” for employees, the bottom line of which was, “Calling 911 will guarantee nothing. You are the first line of defense.” It wasn’t hard to put this in relation to the events of March 2022, but I’ll save that story for another day…)
My point is not to collapse crucial differences between these kinds of tragedies. Rather, it’s that those who survive any of them, to say nothing of those traumatized by military service, probably have something in common. Because trauma is trauma, and Revoir Paris is aware trauma works in mysterious ways. When others have been killed, surviving feels shameful. To speak out about what happened feels like fishing for sympathy or turning oneself into, per Mia’s words, a “sideshow attraction”. “Moving on” is not really an option, and to do so would feel callous. In one of the film’s most devastating moments, Mia takes notice of the municipal waste trucks sweeping away a makeshift memorial in a public square, tossing desiccated bouquets of roses into the trash compactor, junking old candles and weather-battered photos of the victims. Well, I caught myself thinking, I guess it had to happen sometime…