Paris Mem­o­ries – first-look review

It starts out as an ordi­nary day for Mia, a jour­nal­ist and trans­la­tor who works at a radio sta­tion in Paris. She takes her motor­cy­cle to work; she meets her hus­band Vin­cent (Gré­goire Col­in) for din­ner. When Vin­cent – a doc­tor at a local hos­pi­tal – declares he has to leave ear­ly due to a work emer­gency, Mia is deject­ed, and decides to stop for a drink on her way home to avoid a sud­den rain­storm. She sits in a booth and observes the strangers around her; two Asian women tak­ing pho­tographs of each oth­er; a group cel­e­brat­ing someone’s birth­day. Then all hell breaks loose.

Months lat­er, after sur­viv­ing the dead­ly ter­ror­ist attack, Mia is strug­gling to cope with her trau­ma. Phys­i­cal wounds may have healed, but she strug­gles to recall details of the night, and her rela­tion­ship with her hus­band has become strained after sev­er­al months of stay­ing with her moth­er to recu­per­ate. In an attempt to unpack her feel­ings about what hap­pened to her, Mia retraces her steps from the evening in ques­tion, which lead her to meet oth­er sur­vivors, includ­ing the charm­ing Thomas (Benoît Magimel).

Alice Winocour’s Paris Mem­o­ries is one of two films at Cannes this year inspired by the 2015 Bat­a­clan attacks, the oth­er being Cédric Jimenez’s Novem­bre – which takes a dif­fer­ent approach as a thriller about the hunt to catch the per­pe­tra­tors. It’s clear that the wounds from the attack still run deep, and no more so than for Winocour, whose broth­er sur­vived the Bat­a­clan. The con­ver­sa­tions she had with him about his expe­ri­ence inspired this film, though this is a fic­tion­alised account about an attack that is nev­er real­ly explored – the per­pe­tra­tors are unseen, and men­tions to them are vague apart from it being stat­ed that there were sev­er­al attacks through­out Paris that night.

This is like­ly to avoid tak­ing any polit­i­cal stance, but per­haps the wider point can be made that to the vic­tims of the attack, the moti­va­tion is sec­ondary to the life-chang­ing impact. Mia meets a teenag­er whose par­ents died, and a woman who accus­es her of self­ish­ly hid­ing inside a locked bath­room while oth­ers tried to get inside. Grief takes many forms, and Mia’s own has pre­vi­ous­ly been a sort of numb­ness that frus­trat­ed her hus­band. Through a friend­ship with fel­low sur­vivor Thomas she begins to under­stand what hap­pened to her that night, and seeks out the restau­rant work­er who sat with her while the attack was going on.

Amid the film’s explo­ration of trau­ma, Winocour shines a light on the abuse of migrant labour with­in the restau­rant indus­try. As Mia search­es for the man who com­fort­ed her, she learns that many of the restau­rant employ­ees were nev­er account­ed for due to their undoc­u­ment­ed sta­tus. After the attack they sim­ply van­ished – whether they died or fled out of fear of deportation.

Includ­ing this sub­plot is a deft move by Winocour and her team, as it nods to the fact that vic­tim counts often fail the most vul­ner­a­ble, and the media has a bias towards white, mid­dle-class vic­tims when it comes to report­ing acts of ter­ror. Although Winocour does cen­ter this expe­ri­ence with Vir­ginie Efira’s char­ac­ter, this is direct­ly root­ed in her brother’s experiences.

Although a roman­tic sub­plot between Mia and Thomas feels a lit­tle con­trived, Winocour’s film is a poignant medi­a­tion on per­son­al trau­ma and the impor­tance of mem­o­ry. For Mia, reclaim­ing her mem­o­ries is a way to move for­ward, to under­stand what hap­pened to her and start to rebuild. But the film also serves as a trib­ute to Paris – to remem­ber­ing that it is pos­si­ble to love a place despite expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing ter­ri­ble there.

When Mia trav­els the city on her bike or looks out at the square where trib­utes to lives lost are being cleared away, the last­ing con­nec­tion between her and the city is clear. Cement­ed by Efira’s restrained, empa­thet­ic per­for­mance, Paris Mem­o­ries is a deft explo­ration of recov­ery, and a mov­ing trib­ute to Winocour’s broth­er Jérémie and those who were caught up in the attack.