French writer/director Alice Winocour was interested in the connection between the body and the mind before it was cool. Her feature debut “Augustine” (2012) told the story of a supposedly “hysterical” woman and her doctor in 19th century France, while “Disorder” (2015) centered on a soldier-turned bodyguard suffering from PTSD. “Proxima” (2019) followed a female astronaut preparing her body for the demands of life aboard the International Space Station, and her mind for the separation from her daughter that the trip necessitates. Though dealing with complex, often unexplained emotions and behaviors, her films have a straightforward quality to them that can be quite overwhelming — uncomfortable, scary, and sometimes irrational facts of life are faced head-on, putting viewers in a highly vulnerable position.
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“Paris Memories” continues the study of trauma that has animated Winocour’s work so far but focuses less on the capricious, hurt body, and more on the tricks of the mind. The film opens with a sequence establishing its firm alignment to the subjective perspective of Mia (Virginie Efira), a translator of Russian and the partner of Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a surgeon. After a brief stint working on a live translation at a radio show and a dinner with Vincent interrupted by an emergency at the hospital, she makes her way home on her motorcycle but decides to stop in a bistro to wait for the rain to cease. Alone in a place teeming with life and excitement, surrounded by guests ranging from a small group of Chinese tourists taking selfies to a birthday party with cake and sparklers, Mia quite naturally turns into an intent watcher, she and the camera noticing small details about her surroundings. But this close attention is also ominous, knowing what the film is about: soon, shots are heard, and Mia crouches down on the floor while other people are killed around her.
The film thus appears to indulge to some degree in rather distasteful and manipulative suspense building, making note of all the things that would soon disappear and all the moments when things could have gone differently. A more charitable view would be that this is simply the way those details have burnt themselves into Mia’s mind: she has survived the attack, but has forgotten all about it save for those few minutes before the first shot, and she naturally hangs on to those memories. Winocour shows her several months later, back in Paris from a stay in the countryside, and struggling to go on. Though Vincent appears sympathetic, his casual comments and general behavior betray his frustration and his desire to go back to the way things used to be. One particularly odd scene shows the couple at the opera, the emotionally fragile Mia expected to return so soon to such an overwhelming experience.
Even then, however, Winocour keeps things gentle — to a fault. Mia, but also the impatient Vincent, remains dignified throughout their fights, the director choosing to restrict more brutal manifestations of trauma and suffering to secondary characters: one woman, for example, confronts Mia at a survivor’s reunion, accusing her of having locked herself in the bathroom and therefore preventing others from joining her to hide from the attackers. Such characters nicely break up the tone of this overall too polite and elegiac, often one-note film, but none more so than Benoît Magimel’s Thomas. Unlike Mia, he remembers every detail of the event, which could explain his more sarcastic attitude.
As Thomas helps her remember what she was doing during the long, protracted ordeal, Mia finds relief in filling the gap between who she was then, and who she is now. She soon tries to track down other people who might have seen her and helped her, a search that, almost incidentally, sees her reconnect to the city she lives in — but also build a different relationship with it than she ever enjoyed before. Her quest soon brings her into contact with people from different classes of society than her own, and who she probably never would have even spoken to were it not for this tragedy. Here, Winocour veers dangerously close to a glib “we are all connected” sentiment, but it is a testament to her talent as a storyteller and to Efira’s performance that those encounters do not come across as insincere.
It is a moving healing journey, but one that feels almost too smooth, a best-case scenario with few bumps in the road and, more significantly, very few surprises. Winocour’s rather bland formal approach does not help “Paris Memories” escape from the impression of a banal, textbook exploration of trauma, as she resorts to rather tired formal devices and narrative beats to relate Mia’s alienation from the world around her and, later, the connections she eventually forges with others. Voices are muted to represent her feelings of estrangement, and the characters’ late embrace of each other’s scars feels like a cliche. A stronger sense of specificity at both the narrative and formal level might have, perhaps counterintuitively, made this thoughtful film more engaging and affecting. [C+]
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