It was always likely that the terrorist attacks on Paris in 2015 would generate films, novels, music, poetry. It is part of the artist’s job to process such trauma. Yet Alice Winocour will have been understandably nervous about the release of Paris Memories in her home country. It is clearly a work of fiction. There is no mention of the Bataclan massacre or the Stade de France assault. The context is clear, however. The film concerns a woman who gets caught up in a terrorist assault on a restaurant and emerges with little memory of her experiences. One can understand audiences, still negotiating their own psychological wounds, staying away in droves. But Paris Memories – Revoir Paris, the original title, is better – was actually a decent domestic hit.
“The box-office success was a surprise for the distributors and the producers,” Winocour says. “We didn’t expect that. It is certainly not a comedy. But it is a healing process. It was very moving to see people in screening rooms talking about where they were at the time of the attacks. Not just in Paris. It was moving to have those strong reactions.”
Winocour, like so many French people, has a direct familial connection with the attacks. Her brother Jérémie survived the assault on the Bataclan venue that left 90 dead.
“He was caught in the attack at this concert,” she explains. “He was hidden someplace. And I sent him an SMS because I thought he was in the neighbourhood. He called me and he was actually in the concert hall. He said, ‘Don’t send SMS messages, as terrorists can hear the sound of my phone.’”
Paris Memories is plainly informed by these sorts of testimonies. Virginie Efira plays a successful translator who, riding her motorbike, takes shelter from the rain in a brasserie. She is watching a birthday party when, their faces unseen by the camera, gunmen break in and randomly shoot the patrons. She emerges in a state of partial amnesia but gradually pieces together memories of holding hands with a kitchen worker while the carnage escalated. The protagonist begins a search that reconnects her with the city.
“I always do the same when I am writing. I love to meet people and talk, to discover a world I don’t know,” Winocour says. “What is amazing is how reality is more incredible than what you can imagine. Sometimes it is so incredible that you can’t actually believe it.”
Now in her mid-40s, Winocour was raised in a Jewish family. She initially thought of studying law but drifted to La Fémis, the distinguished film school, where she focused on screenwriting. Success came with her script for Ursula Meier’s singular Swiss drama Home, from 2008. In 2012, Augustine, Winocour’s directorial debut, landed in Critics’ Week at Cannes and went on to be nominated for best first feature at the César Awards. How was that early Cannes experience?
“It was unreal,” she says in her sparky manner. “But I was so excited to get in the boxing ring with all the worldwide journalists. Ha ha! It was so exciting to meet film-makers from all over the world.”
Pondering her busy creative life, she takes some inspiration from a grandmother who, a gifted concert pianist, was forbidden to play by a husband frightened of her talent. “We were very lucky to have a grandmother who was so talented and gave us music lessons,” she says.
Winocour has developed as a great humanist film-maker. Her screenplay for Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s wonderful, Oscar-nominated Mustang, the story of five orphaned Turkish sisters, finally won her the César in 2016. The fascinating astronaut drama Proxima, another directorial effort, followed in 2019.
Paris Memories seems to have connected with her home country in a profound fashion. Part of that may have to do with her determination, despite the grim subject matter, to celebrate the French capital in all its diversity.
“It was a real quest to show Paris in a different way. We usually see Paris in the same way. It is those classical shots from Paris,” she says.
She thinks of Mia, her protagonist, as taking the “angel’s perspective” in a Wim Wenders film.
“She is kind of an angel visiting the city. She is not really in her body. She is in limbo on her motorbike. She is not really in the place. I wanted the film to celebrate humanity and fraternity. I didn’t want it to just be a sad film about an attack on the country. I wanted the film to celebrate this passion for life and everything the terrorists wanted to destroy – life, joy.”
That description perhaps makes Paris Memories sound like a sentimental piece of work. It is not that. It has its flinty moments as well as its outbreaks of warmth. Paris is shown as being robust but also at times unforgiving. Winocour has taken particular care in her depiction of the opening attack – we learn of the attackers’ faces only from later descriptions. There is no discussion of the precise motives. The killers remain obscure agents of random destruction.
“I think a film about the terrorists would be super-interesting,” she says. “But I really wanted to make a film about the traces of a trauma and how you get back to life. I made a film before about a traumatised soldier. It’s a topic I always get back to. I don’t really know why. It’s about resilience and a kind of liberation. Even if you survive, you are then another person. You see things differently, because you are not the same person. But it was important to have this feeling of the attack – even if it was just two minutes.”
Winocour is working on two new features. One is a horror movie in the English language. She concedes that the beginning of Paris Memories may have fed into that project. For now she has more good work to do promoting this fine film in celebration of a fine city.
“To film both the violence and the recovery is, I hope, a healing process,” she says. “The city itself is healing – as a character in itself.”
Paris Memories is in cinemas from August 4th
