Even from the safety of her home, the film-maker Alice Winocour’s experience of the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 was terrifying. Her younger brother, Jérémie, was hiding in a back room at the Bataclan concert hall, and forbade her from texting him in case it gave away his location. She had to wait to hear that he made it out alive. Later, he told her about a random thought he had while waiting to die: that he had left a half-eaten yoghurt open in the fridge. What would whoever found it make of his poor kitchen hygiene?
It is a touch of human absurdity that resurfaces in Paris Memories, her new film, about the 13 November attacks. Unlike the recent Jean Dujardin film November, it completely ignores religion and largely passes over the bloodshed. Instead, it joins films such as You Will Not Have My Hate and One Year, One Night to wade through the aftermath. The French title Revoir Paris gets it: starring Benedetta’s Virginie Efira as Mia, a radio translator caught in the crossfire in a cafe, the film focuses on how she reconstructs her memories of that night and with them her inner harmony, as well as that of the city of lights.
Winocour’s brother did not think the barbarity and horror of the attacks could be represented on film. The director handles it smartly, though, from Mia’s point of view, prone in terror on the cafe floor, watching the gunmen’s feet pass by. But it is the film’s later narrative tack that is most innovative, less a plotline than a disquieting void Mia must fill as she pierces her amnesia. “My brother often said to me it was like a painting that had been torn, a hole in the canvas,” Winocour says, swallowing hard as she broaches the subject. “And I had the feeling of trying to sew up the canvas with the film, of trying to repair everything, to console, to soothe.”
The 47-year-old – wearing a blue T-shirt with an insignia reading “Flesh”, and gazing from beneath a long brown fringe – is sitting in the back of a cafe that is one of her habitual writing spots near her home. In the well-heeled third arrondissement, just a few hundred metres from Boulevard Voltaire in the tattier 11th, where the Bataclan is, it is one of a million effortlessly smart Parisian bars that might have been targeted that evening.
Filmed in autumn 2021 in the “highly electric” atmosphere during the trials of the attackers, the film – particularly with its introspective focus – melded into this collective process of mourning and reflection. “As we were shooting, there were candles outside restaurants, and people would stop to ask if something had happened there,” says Winocour. “I realised I was making a film about the trauma of an entire country. Virginie and I felt we had a lot of responsibility on our shoulders.”
Winocour was conscious of the debate that often coalesces around post-atrocity films: is it too soon to depict them on film, or, as some suggested to her about the Paris attacks, too late? She simply felt the time had come for her to address her own shellshock. Having been away filming in Germany and Kazakhstan on her previous picture, the astronaut drama Proxima, she came back to her home city in an appropriately dislocated state. “There was this idea of being a stranger in your own city, looking at it as if from limbo, as if you’re no longer in the land of the living,” she says, winding the wires of her earbuds around her fingers. The film it often resembles, as Mia wanders the boulevards tapping the psyches of her fellow citizens, is Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.
Winocour is part of a cohort of French female directors (including Julia Ducournau, Céline Sciamma, Mia-Hansen Løve, Audrey Diwan, Rebecca Zlotowski and Katell Quillévéré) experienced enough to have accrued status in the industry, but radical enough to be still pushing formal and thematic boundaries. What she shares with many of them is a strong interest in the body as a site of struggle and control. Winocour’s full-headlamp grin hides what she says is an unusual physical sensitivity: “I’m rather hysterical in the sense that my body reacts to everything.”
This reactiveness is possibly linked to the fact that she has been blind in her right eye since birth. This was due to having a beauty spot in her retina: something that was inoperable at that time and resulted in the irreversible atrophying of her optic nerve. She wore an eyepatch at school to prevent her from having a lazy eye. Now, the imbalance is barely evident, apart from her tendency to be more animated on that side of her face, as if overcompensating. But it has marked her psychologically. “It’s linked to a feeling that I had strongly in childhood and adolescence, of a kind of marginality in the sense of never having known what it’s like to see with two eyes.”
Trauma is Winocour’s keynote subject. Her 2012 debut feature, Augustine, a clammy and arresting blend of science and eroticism, follows the 19th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot as he probes the source of his female patient’s violent fits. The subject grew out of her graduation project at the Fémis film school, and she says researching it became a “Pandora’s box” that she couldn’t resist dipping into; she ended up transposing her eye condition on to the lead character, who is paralysed for a time on one side of her face. Winocour’s heightened attention to sound influenced her 2015 follow-up, Disorder, which put us in the cacophonous, post-traumatic stress disorder-afflicted headspace of an Afghanistan veteran turned bodyguard. Proxima, about a Mars-bound astronaut trying to preserve her relationship with her daughter, tapped into another psychic wound: Winocour almost dying after giving birth prematurely.
If the body always remembers, then trauma is deep in Winocour’s genes, beyond her own lifetime. Her paternal grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor, a Ukrainian Jew who met her grandmother in Paris just after the war, while the latter was (ultimately unsuccessfully) trying to trace her own parents. He wasn’t, says Winocour, an advocate of Paris Memories’ idea that remembering and sharing heals. “He decided to cut himself off from associations [with Jewishness]. He said very little about what happened, and we didn’t even have the right to talk about it to other people because he was afraid of the return of antisemitism. He thought it was good that our name could pass for a French name.”
His granddaughter, though, has not taken the same path. In Russian and Ukrainian, Winocour means something like distiller, and this is exactly what her films do: boil down trauma to an essence that is fundamental and defining for her characters. Her films feel as if they want to be straight genre affairs, but are diverted off-course from convention, too fascinated by human frailties and scarring. There is something strangely life-affirming about that, and maybe that comes from her grandfather too. “He was an extremely joyful person, maybe the most joyful I’ve ever met.” Without realising, she has hitched up her T-shirt sleeves into a makeshift gilet, ready for action. “He transmitted a life-force and a lust for life to us that were quite intense.”
• Paris Memories is released on 4 August.
