Paris Memories review – a poignant mediation on personal trauma

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. Then all hell breaks loose.

Months later, after surviving the 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).

It’s clear that the wounds from the 2015 Bataclan attack still run deep, and no more so than for Winocour, whose brother survived the incident. 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.

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 centre this experience with Virginie Efira’s character, this is directly rooted in her brother’s experiences.

While the 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.

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 other victims and survivors.

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