Mereghetti’s report card Eight destinies after the Bataclan, the challenge to return to life (score 7½) – time.news

2023-11-05 21:52:42

by Paolo Mereghetti

Director Alice Winocour wanted to delve into the minds of those who escaped a terrorist attack to understand how they can find the strength to move forward

At the origin there is the experience of the director’s brother, who survived the Bataclan massacre (13 November 2015). But between that attack and the release of the film (presented last year at the Cannes Fortnight) seven years passed and the making of another film, «Proxima» (2019). Because Alice Winocour did not simply want to reconstruct a fact but rather delve into the minds of those who came out alive from that drama to understand how one can “go back to living”. And in fact it’s not just Mia’s (Virginie Efira) story that we follow: there are seven others that intersect and overlap one another. This is why the Italian title – Re-embracing Paris – risks misleading the viewer: the original, “Revoir Paris” (Seeing Paris again) gives a better sense of the film, that of a survivor who wants to return to “see” the metropolis of she.

The attack erased her memory and after three months (spent in the countryside by her mother) she wants to start living in her city again. At the beginning of the film we saw the attack, we heard the shots, then an explosion, while Mia tries to hide behind the tables of a bistro where she had entered to shelter from the heavy rain, after her partner (Grégoire Colin ) had left her, called by a work call. But all this ends up being reduced to a large black spot in Mia’s memory (just as the screen sometimes goes completely black), reiterating that the path of the film is something that is not intended to be a realistic reconstruction but rather a metaphorical journey into the protagonist’s need (and all of France) to come to terms with what has happened to find the strength to move forward.

Here are the off-screen voices that let us share a bit of their experience. Here are the faces of the survivors who once a week, led by Sara (Maya Sansa), meet in the bistro where the attack took place to try to clarify their memories: Felicia (Nastya Golubeva Carax) tries to reconstruct the last moments of life of her parents who died in the attack, Camille (Anne-Lise Heimburger) deals with an anger that makes her distort reality, Thomas (Benoît Magimel) tries to forget the scars that still mark her body and Nour (Sofia Lesaffre) carries within herself the anguish of knowing that in the tragedy someone didn’t even have the right to say they were there, because they were hired illegally to work in the kitchen of the attack.

And while Mia tries to shed light on her memories to find the person who held her hand while she was hiding, helping her overcome those terrible moments, all around Paris wants to forget and return to normality. This is told to us by the evening with friends which should mark Mia’s return to society and instead does nothing but reiterate the strangeness that she feels growing inside her; this is told to us by her meeting with Thomas’ wife (Dolores Chaplin), who is well aware that what has happened to her will separate her rather than unite her more with her husband; The street cleaners who freed the Place de la République from the flowers and candles that the Parisians had left in memoriam tell us with an objectivity that borders on cynicism. As if that type of pity no longer has the right to exist if we want to look forward.

Well, it is through scenes like these, in which Virginie Efira moves as best she could, capable of restoring that split between a body that moves like an automaton and a mind that struggles to orient itself, it is precisely through a whispered and almost ghostly acting and images that instead impose the concreteness of reality that the director wins the challenge of telling something that risks being unspeakable, such as the pain and anguish of those who survived and want to ask themselves why. It is not the first time that French cinema has tried to tell the tragedy of terrorist attacks but it has never done so with this sensitivity, truly capable of bringing together – to use the director’s words – “the world of the dead and the world of the living” .

November 5, 2023 (modified November 5, 2023 | 9:18 pm)

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