Belgian actress Virginie Efira, who is perhaps best remembered as the sexy nun from Verhoeven’s “Benedette”, won the Cesar award for French actress of the year in the shocking drama Alice Winocour (Disorder, Proxima). Efira is Mia, a translator who will survive the terrorist attack in Paris by a miracle. After an evening with her doctor partner Vincent (Gregoire Colin), she decides to go for one more drink on the way home. And just when she was about to go out after the horse, terrorists broke into the restaurant and started shooting at people. Three months after that horrible and unimaginable event, Mia is still deeply traumatized. And she doesn’t remember exactly what happened in those moments and it’s like she has a hole in her memory, and it’s clear that she can’t continue with her life as if nothing had happened.
She is trying to understand what happened in the first place and how she managed to survive while dozens of people were killed, dozens more wounded, and none of the people close to her can simply understand what she is going through. From that moment on, everyone treats her differently, and Mia will soon begin to develop a special bond with the other survivors of that terrible event who still occasionally meet in the same place. Through conversations with these people, Mia will slowly begin to piece together a mosaic of the events of that fateful night, and she will develop a special connection with Thomas (Benoit Magimel), a businessman who was seriously wounded that night.
“Revoir Paris” or “Paris Memories” had its premiere during the director’s evenings of the festival in Cannes, and it is clear that Winocour was inspired by the terrorist attack in the Bataclan for this story. That night, her younger brother was also in the Paris club, but luckily he was among the survivors, but surviving something like that must leave deep trauma and consequences on people. And from the beginning it is clear to us that Mia has a severe form of PTSD and that she cannot just forget what she experienced, but she doesn’t seem to want to. She is simply not the same person anymore and surviving has put her in a situation to reevaluate her life and try to start over.