Revoir Paris

After Mia survives an attack in a restaurant where many other patrons perish, she is left unable to remember what happened. Her attempts to recall the event throughout the movie appear to change her life and pull her into a different direction. In typical fashion for many French movies, tedium ensues. If you have a good hour and 45 minutes to spare, it will engage you and possibly bore you at the same time. French filmmakers are good at that, not sure why.

This movie shows very well what (I imagine) it happens after an event like the one from November 2015 in Paris: life just cannot be the same. Survivors are haunted by what they have experienced and they feel deeply connected to the other people that survived - many of whom feel the urge to revisit the bistro where this took place and make sense of what happened. This experience is so profound, intimate and shifting for someone that this basically creates a new family, of survivors, at the expense of the existing relationships.

The main character finds herself trying to remember what happened, partly because she is being accused of blocking herself in a toilet in the moment of the attack and denying a hiding place for the others, partly because she cannot find shelter in her former relationships (friends, lover) all of which don't seem to understand why she cannot move on.

Among trauma, PTSD (portrayed in a very compelling way) and her struggle to piece things together, we also discover hope and human connection, and this is one of those movies where suspension of disbelief works. At some point I was actually surprised to recognize an actor from other movies, it just didn't occur to me that I was not watching a piece of real life. Leaving cheesiness aside, I highly recommend this one.

I knew it was to be considered an arthouse film and that there was to be some violent attack within Paris. It was good that I was not told too much because I would not really have wanted to see that terrible attack in November 2015. It is and it isn't but is amazing and one of my best films for some time. At the very beginning there is a slow zoom from within a room looking out through the curtains and beyond the balcony. As the shot is held and there is a lovely view of Paris although it is not one that I recognise or identify. This surprisingly, unspectacular zoom reminded me of the long one at the end of Antonioni's, The Passenger (1975) dialogue is splendid the memory plays with us and so unsettling that it gives me the shivers. Obviously we have the appalling and sickening moment but it is later on that Mia (Virginie Efira) remembers little bits now and again and it is thrilling but worrying all the time. It is not usually the Paris we know but the bustling streets and noisy traffic and the thrill of the action more of Mia and her uncovering what and who she has to find. Clever and intelligent piece quite remarkable and I want to watch it again, after a little while.

When I read a description of this film, I was going to skip it as the topic didn't interest me. Then I thought that it would be nice to see Paris and I could skip through the boring parts. There are so many places where a film like this could have fallen down a rabbit hole and been written off. Like focusing too deeply on those who died or individual grief or revenge or another direction, but it didn't.

It focused on Mia a victim three months after the tragedy, who starts trying to piece that night together. She stumbles across a survivors group and they share information from that night which leads her farther along. This was a much better technique than having Mia sit on a psychiatrist's couch trying to remember and flashback after flashback.

A fine film, not to be missed.

When unknown gunmen enter a Parisian restaurant and start shooting people that were enjoying their evening soirée, innocent lives are lost and the lives of those who survived are altered forever. Winocur's film portrays an already mundane fact of life, of armed terrorism that has entered the main stream of our lives, threatening to become an expected normal daily reality everywhere.

The survivors of the attack are seeking closure by gathering to commiserate and memorialize. After the traumatic event, Mia (Virginie Efira) is desperately searching for the cook who held her hand while they were hiding together during the shooting.

The search bears fruit and she eventually succeeds.