This is one of the strongest films of the season. See Paris again by Alice Winocour, discovered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at the Cannes Film Festival, follows the painful journey of survivors of an attack in a Parisian brasserie who are trying to rebuild their lives. The two actors, Virginie Efira and Benoît Magimel, are exceptional there.
“It’s more of an investigation than a film on the attacks themselves,” confided Virginie Efira to 20 minutes. My character is trying to regain her memory after having experienced a traumatic situation. In a Parisian brasserie, the young woman saw shooters disembark who decimated the consumers around her. The shock was so violent that she no longer remembers the details of the attack, nor her behavior in the face of danger.
Rebuilding after the horror
Accused by a witness of having been terribly cowardly during the attack, the heroine will only be able to resume the course of her existence when she has made peace with her memories. The choice of the director to show the attack by filming only the feet of the characters reinforces the process of identification of the spectator. A magnificent work on the sound completes to transcribe the impression of chaos engulfing the protagonists. There is not the slightest complacency in this scene but a contextualization of the ordeals experienced by the characters. “None of the victims has a global vision of the attack, specifies the director. They have retained only snippets of information like the fragments of a broken mirror. »
The painful process of reconstructing the puzzle allows Virginie Efira to deliver an impressive performance against a very touching Benoît Magimel as a man affected in his head as in his flesh. See Paris again is a story of resilience and solidarity for which the filmmaker drew on the memories of her brother, a survivor of the Bataclan on November 13, 2015, with whom she had remained in contact by SMS during the attack.
It is to be hoped that the public will not be put off by the theme of a film that is necessarily harsh in its description of horror, but which turns out to be luminous and galvanizing by celebrating the best that human beings can have after having experiences the worst.