Revoir Paris Review: A Quietly Gutting Depiction of a Survivor Rebuilding Her Life

Alice Winocour’s film is a largely pragmatic ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.

Revoir Paris
Photo: Music Box Films

Early in Alice Winocour’s quietly gutting Revoir Paris, a terrorist attack leaves many dead and its protagonist physically wounded and spiritually shattered. In what little we see of her before the attack, Mia (Virginie Efira) seems to have an undramatic life as a translator in Paris whose biggest concern is that living with her doctor boyfriend, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), isn’t as fulfilling as it could be. After he’s called back to the hospital from their dinner out, she heads home on her own and stops at a bistro for a drink. Then the shooting begins.

Winocour and editor Julien Lacheray present the attack with a steady and non-sensationalized ferocity. The shots come like hammer blows and bodies fall with sickening speed in a segment that stays in the shock, confusion, and horror of the moment rather than falling back on tricks like slow motion or distorted audio. Afterward, the story rides an arc—of memory and healing—that reads at first as largely conventional before taking some unexpected turns.

Months after the attack, Mia is going through the motions and just beginning to face up to the trauma she wants to forget but can’t. Forcing herself to return to the bistro, she makes tentative connections with some of the other survivors but is horrified to hear from one that she supposedly hid in a bathroom during the attack and locked everyone else out.

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Under the patient guidance of a counselor (Maya Sansa), Mia begins to slowly push back the fog that shrouds most of her recollections. Once she locates a memory, of hiding in a storage room with a cook who held her hand and softly told her that things would be okay, finding him gives her some kind of purpose. Even though she’s largely left her previous life behind—after moving into a new apartment, a baffled Vincent shouts, “I wish I had been in that fucking attack!”—Revoir Paris seems to suggest that there may not have been much life there in the first place.

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Winocour, Jean-Stéphane Bron, and Marcia Romano’s screenplay doesn’t give much away about Mia, leaving it to Efira’s watchful pensiveness to indicate the character’s depth. Against the woman’s relative flatness, which is partly but not entirely a result of her trauma, the other characters stand out in comparison. This is particularly true of Thomas (Benoît Magimel), a fellow survivor who Mia locked eyes with just before the shooting started and is now patiently yet determinedly wooing her. Crutches and crippling claustrophobia aside, Thomas seems a paragon of wounded confidence next to Mia, which seems a large part of why she’s drawn to him. The bedroom eyes and Magimel’s way with wry patter also don’t hurt.

Mia is given some affecting moments of emotional closure which have even more power for being so understated. But despite the work that she has to go through to get there, they seem almost too easily laid out for her as steps on a healing journey. A scene where she helps the teenaged daughter, Félicia (Nastya Golubeva), of two of the victims of the terrorist attack say goodbye to her parents’ memory by going to see Monet’s waterlily paintings at the Musée de l’Orangerie is beautiful but also conspicuously neat and too heartfelt by half.

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More affecting is her lengthy hunt for Assane (Amadou Mbow), the cook she believes held her hand in the attack. Like many of the people in the attack, he was an undocumented immigrant at risk of deportation and so in the aftermath reckons not only with trauma but invisibility. The faces who appear at the memorials and survivor gatherings are noticeably white. We briefly hear Assane’s take on the attack, in one of the voiceover monologues from other survivors that are peppered through the film, and his bracing declaration “I’d been through too much danger to die in a closet” hints at all he had gone through before the terrorists appeared.

Revoir Paris’s view of the underground economy that runs Paris is part of Winocour’s approach—that is, to set Mia’s narrative against the city’s lovingly captured brightness and bustle. But the city is also clearly too busy to stop itself in mourning. One of the film’s most moving scenes is a wordless sequence where Mia watches workers throw away the flowers and candles from a memorial to the attack. That pairing of mourning and pragmatism comes across as more of an apt ode to resilience in the post-Bataclan era than any stirring monologue.

Score: 
 Cast: Virginie Efira, Benoît Magimel, Grégoire Colin, Maya Sansa, Amadou Mbow, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Annie-Lise Heimburger, Sofia Lasaffre, Clarisse Makundul  Director: Alice Winocour  Screenwriter: Alice Winocour, Jean-Stéphane Bron, Marcia Romano  Distributor: Music Box Films  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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