They have removed the handmade memorial crosses from the Allen Premium Outlets in Allen, Texas, where, on May 6, 2023 (and just ten minutes from where this critic lives as of this writing), a gunman killed eight people before being killed by police in a brief foot chase. This realization mirrors a startlingly emotional moment in writer/director Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, in which a woman who was inexplicably and miraculously spared during a mass shooting retraces her steps in the restaurant where it happened in order to remember the details. This is a stern watch and understandably so, but the verisimilitude with which Winocour and collaborating screenwriters Jean-Stéphane Bron and Marcia Romano treat the details of this story is both appreciated and considerable.
At one point, weeks after the shooting has occurred, Mia (Virginie Efira) watches as street cleaners sweep away the memorial that had been placed near the site of the killings. Have the survivors, their families, or the victims’ families really moved on? Probably not. It still hasn’t happened in Allen, let alone in Parkland or Aurora or Las Vegas or Orlando. Events like this occur with worrisome frequency in America, and now we have a story set in France, not even a decade after a series of coordinated terror attacks gripped the country and its surrounding continent with fear. Obviously, the filmmakers don’t explore the killers or their motive in this story, nor do they even show their faces. There is no need for that, because there can be no justification.
The shooting opens the film, staged with brutal efficiency and more or less focused entirely on Mia’s face as she witnesses the deaths of the first two victims and ducks under a table or two while chaos erupts around her. Then, as anyone might in a situation like this one, she blacks out the rest of the attack, including every move she makes to keep herself safe. Mia doesn’t want to remember, even when faced with the concept of a group of survivors who gather at the site to put the pieces together, but she still eventually begins to recall. She remembers distinctly the sensation of holding someone’s hand, of crouching in a small space away from sight, and of facing a couple who, rather suggestively, are not among those gathering at the restaurant to heal.
Winocour’s film is at its best when it simmers in this liminal space between trauma and healing. Mia’s relationship with her husband Vincent (Grégoire Colin) begins to strain in the wake of an event for which he was not present, to the point that he admits he wished he was there with her – an idea that is unfathomable to her and to us. The mystery that rises out of the shooting for Mia is not the identity of the shooter, so much as that of the man with whom she crouched in safety. He was a cook (Amadou Mbow), but as the restaurant employed various undocumented immigrants, the man became difficult to trace. For Mia, the act of recalling becomes the need to heal and the desire for closure, as harsh and unforgiving as those acts might be.
Eventually, the movie grows a little tiresome when it feels the need to set Mia on a path of romance with Thomas (Benoît Magimel), a fellow survivor who initially provides some of the context of her actions and must come to terms with the murders of two co-workers. Revoir Paris struggles to reconcile this shift with the tidiness of how it concludes Mia’s story, but then again, perhaps that’s an unfair criticism. No such story truly ends, unless the mandates of fictional drama necessitate it. Do we need a story like this one to tell us what we already know? Maybe not, but here is one that is mature and thoughtful in the ways it does tell us.
Photo Courtesy of Music Box
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