REVOIR PARIS - Mark Reviews Movies

Revoir Paris, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 22, 2023

The world seems to stop for Mia (Virginie Efira) as she lies on the floor of the back room of a restaurant, where a gunman has entered and opened fire on anyone he can see. That feeling may be the case for her and other survivors of this attack, but the world keeps moving, as ordinary people live out their ordinary lives around them in only a matter of a few months following the violence. Writer/director Alice Winocour's Revoir Paris tells its story in the midst of that contradiction.

This story's perspective belongs to Mia, who was a fairly ordinary person living out her pretty ordinary life until chance put her in that restaurant. She had a good job as a Russian translator with a steady stream of work. Her marriage to Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a successful surgeon, was a happy one by all appearances. Before arriving at the restaurant, the worst thing to happen to Mia on the day of the attack was that she dropped a glass on the kitchen floor, but that's cleaned up quickly and immediately forgotten.

Winocour's film begins on the morning of that day, and if not for the severe and mildly threatening score that accompanies the vignettes of Mia going about her usual business, we'd have no hint or notion that there's any reason for suspense or fear about what's there in front of us. With it, though, there's a mournful, dreadful edge to the proceedings, because it's obvious something is about to happen. There's just no understanding as to where or when it will.

The screenplay, written in collaboration with Jean-Stéphane Bron and Marcia Romano, is no thriller, though, and neither is it a dramatization or procedural about the real-life coordinated attacks that took place in Paris in 2015. Indeed, there's also no way of determining if Winocour's film is a direct or an imagined reflection of that horrifying event, because the scope of it is almost exclusively restricted to Mia's point of view. That feels like the right decision, because it evades any claims of exploitation, all political discussions about the causes and consequences of that particular series of attacks, and the potential of simplifying just how devastating that attack was or overlooking the countless stories of terror, grief, and uncertainty that resulted from it.

Instead, this serves as an intimate account of the effects and impact such violence might have on a single person. In an instant, Mia's entire life suddenly becomes defined by trauma, while also becoming intertwined with the deaths and suffering of so many people who might as well have been strangers—save for the fact that they're all connected by an act of unthinkable violence and the uncertainty of what a life in the aftermath of it could be.

After witnessing the attack at the restaurant up to a point (Winocour suggests most of the violence by way of cries and gunshots, making the moments in which our protagonist actually sees someone killed in front of her even more horrifying), the story jarringly moves forward about three months. Following a stay with her mother somewhere outside Paris, Mia has returned to her apartment in the city, is hoping to have a scar from a wound she received during the attack removed, and says she's ready to return to work. She doesn't remember the attack—only pieces of memories of what happened leading up to it.

By another chance, Mia passes the restaurant on her way home and feels compelled to go inside, look around, and try to recall what did happen. Other survivors and family members of the victims feel that way, too—enough so that the restaurant closes every Monday morning so that a support group can meet. Sara (Maya Sansa), the group's leader, wants to help Mia remember, but Thomas (Benoît Magimel), a man who recalls seeing Mia across the room on the night he received injuries to both legs and saw two co-workers murdered in front of him, can't comprehend why she would want to remember anything about the attack.

Mia doesn't understand the compulsion, either. She just knows that she wants to know.

Her story, then, becomes a search both for an account of what she saw and did on that night and for some semblance of meaning in, comprehension of, and/or closure to the experience. Mia starts asking people, like Thomas and some others in the group who might have noticed her before or amidst the chaos, about their own experiences. As the picture of where she was and what she did and whom she might have been with during the almost two-hour attack becomes clearer, those other stories start to become known, too.

At times, Winocour passes the narrative from Mia, who has just discovered some new detail, to a person connected with that detail, and in narration, those people describe what happened to them and how it changed their own perspective on life in the aftershock of trauma, grief, and guilt for surviving when so many didn't. The way in which Winocour expands the scope of this narrative, while also maintaining that sense of the specifics of a personal story, is impressive and haunting, particularly in the moments of Mia realizing how impossible it is for those she knows and loves to understand her now and of the world gradually moving past the attack (There's a shot of workers clearing a memorial that's distressing in how routine the act is).

Some other elements of Revoir Paris, such as a romance and a touching but oversimplified conclusion, don't quite seem to fit within this tale's introspective exploration of attempting to find some meaning or comfort in the aftermath of such cruel horror. That search, much aided by Efira's nuanced portrayal of trauma, feels authentic and genuinely compassionate here, and that's what matters.

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