Paris Memories (15)
Directed by Alice Winocour

THE extraordinary benefit of having a national film culture is that this subtle and powerful medium can be used to process events of national significance for a mass audience and in an artistically satisfying and cathartic way.

But you’ll never have a national film culture until you reserve the majority of your screens for national product. That’s why it doesn’t exist in the UK (just go see what’s playing at your local Omni) but it does exist in France.

Paris Memories (a poor translation of Revoir Paris) is the kind of film that the French can make, and we cannot.

From the very start you know you are in the hands of a highly skilful storyteller. It just takes a few shots to establish Paris and a couple in its midst — he is a surgeon and she a translator from Russian. Mia (Virginie Efira) is younger, she’s beautiful and she’s disconcerted by her partner. They have a meal but he must leave, and she consoles herself with a glass of wine in a random bistro.

And then the gunfire starts.

It’s no surprise to find that the director’s brother was inside the Bataclan when the Islamists opened fire because this shocking experience is not just brilliantly handled but seen purely from the point of view of a victim of the attack who finds herself overwhelmed with PTSD.

There is so much indiscriminate killing that the mind blanks out the details (and the film cannot show what isn’t remembered) and then struggles obsessively to recover them.

This is a film, therefore, not only made for her brother with exceptional empathy and understanding, but also to address an event that is a collective national trauma.

When the survivors find themselves returning to the scene of the crime, with great reluctance and some agony they recognise that their lives cannot return to what they were before. They have an impossible task: to internalise the trauma and find some kind of redemption within it.

A teenage girl is searching for any trace or message from her murdered parents. One woman accuses another of selfish disregard for others, threatening to worsen any therapeutic outcome. And there was the accident of life-saving encounters with strangers who have gone missing.

The trauma has broken barriers of class and race and it is across this broken, unfamiliar landscape that Mia must journey in a performance of outstanding control and restrained emotional truth.

Her discoveries are astonishing and handled with a tact and authenticity that you never doubt. Alice Winocour has an extraordinary relish for every nuance of psychology and every slightest gesture in the course of this wise and life-affirming odyssey.

More than recommended — this is a masterpiece.

Out in cinemas today