When Mia, the heroine of the tense French drama “Revoir Paris,” thinks about the night her life changed, her face seems to drain of all feeling, almost as if she were emptying it out. Months earlier, she survived a terrorist attack, but now she can’t remember much of what happened that evening. All she retains are vivid fragments — an image of a birthday cake ablaze with candles, the steady pounding of torrential rain — that she can’t piece together. The past may be a foreign country, but for Mia it’s one that also now lies partly in ruin.
“Revoir Paris” is about grief and pain and pushing through to the next day. More centrally, it is about how trauma changes memory, sometimes shattering and distorting it. That makes it about storytelling and the stories that we tell to, and about, ourselves, which means that it’s about identity. The assault shapes Mia’s life and has come to define her: She’s now a survivor. Yet the catastrophe remains out of reach. “Maybe you’re not ready to talk,” a well-meaning friend says, not understanding that without her memories, Mia can’t yet fully tell her story.
The movie opens on a day seemingly like any other, although there’s a pronounced elegiac cast to the instrumental music and the piercing violin notes. For Mia — an emotionally vivid Virginie Efira — it begins with morning coffee for her and a bowl of food for her cat. Then she’s off to her day job as a translator, winding through the streets on her Triumph motorcycle. (Yes, she is independent; yes, the make is too on point.) Later, she has dinner with her lover, Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a surgeon who’s soon called back to work. She heads home alone, but when it starts pouring, she stops in another bistro to get out of the rain.
What happened next is the question — an empirical fact that the writer-director Alice Winocour skillfully turns into a taut existential mystery, one in which Mia is both the victim and the lead investigator. Part of what gives the mystery its power and feeling is that there’s a good chance you know exactly what took place: On Nov. 13, 2015, Islamic State extremists initiated a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris using guns and explosives. During the assault, 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in locations across the city, including at the Bataclan concert hall. In interviews, Winocour has said that her brother was among the Bataclan concertgoers; he survived.
“Revoir Paris” opens the morning of the attack, but soon after the assault ends, the story jumps forward several months. It resumes with Mia in a medical office, a doctor closely examining a jagged scar on her abdomen. She has been away from Paris and staying with her mother, an interlude that Winocour skips entirely. Instead, you follow Mia as she goes about her everyday life while beginning to reconstruct the night. As the past returns — in elliptical bursts and then in lengthier passages — Mia’s splintered memories gradually form a coherent whole, making her the author of a harrowing story within a story.
Winocour’s approach is by turns discreet and direct. While Mia putters in her kitchen on the morning of the attack, for instance, she drops a wine glass on her floor, breaking it, an eerie foreshadowing of the shattered glass that will carpet the bistro floor hours later. Winocour largely avoids showing that night’s visceral horrors, abstaining from gruesome spectacle in favor of shocking pinpricks: the sound of a gasping scream, an image of a shoeless foot. Using all the tools at her disposal — narrative compression, sinewy camerawork, sharp editing, an ethereal score, stricken faces — Winocour powerfully conveys the unspeakable.
As it develops, “Revoir Paris” becomes perilously overplotted. Mia connects with a group of survivors, including a teenager (Nastya Golubeva), whose parents died in the attack, as well as another unlucky restaurant patron (Benoît Magimel). The three share memories and sometimes more, forming an ad hoc support group as Mia sets out to find another survivor, Assane (Amadou Mbow), a search that takes her down unpersuasive byways. Yet even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.
Revoir Paris
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
