Memo from the Cinema Desk: Revoir Paris and Afire
I enjoyed two fine films recently, at home, alas, not at the theater where film is meant to be seen, but better than not at all. Revoir Paris (2022) and Afire (2023) are available on Kanopy, which streams films with no fees and no commercials by partnering with public libraries and universities. Kanopy is a remarkable resource with an array of contemporary and classic film, world cinema, documentaries, series.
Revoir Paris is directed by Alice Winocour and features Virginie Efira in an intense drama with a Bergmanesque feel to it. Mia (Efira) is a Russian translator whose dinner with her partner, a doctor, is cut short when he is called back to the hospital due to an emergency. Caught in a downpour while riding home from the restaurant on her motorcycle, Mia takes refuge in a bistro where she orders a glass of wine and waits for the rain to let up. As she is about to leave a masked man bursts in and opens fire with an automated weapon intent on killing as many people as possible in what turns out to be one of several terrorist attacks throughout the city.
Mia survives with a minor wound and no memory of anything that happened after the shooting started. She comes away traumatized, her life so upended by an obsession with remembering that she breaks with her partner. Over the weeks and months that follow, she tries to piece together what happened. Drawn back to the bistro, she finds a support group of survivors that meet there once a week. Traces of memory return as she connects with others struggling to come to terms with what happened that night.
This film is my introduction to director Anna Winocour. She strikes all the right notes. Though the attack occupies only a few moments in the film, those moments seem an eternity to people gripped by terror, the claustrophobic feel in the terribly small bistro, a sense of unreality, not knowing what to do, as they desperately try to escape or hide. They are rendered without sensationalism or the graphic violence to which filmgoers are too often treated, and their impact is all the greater for it.
Virginie Efira is a Belgian-French actress who has been a favorite since I happened on Victoria (2016) while browsing through the Kanopy listings two years ago. She is one of those actors who appear to work all the time, and I have caught only a handful of her films thus far. The Sense of Wonder (2015), An Impossible Love (2018), and Night Shift (2020) are all first rate. I should add that I was less taken with Sybil (2019). Efira is super in all of them.
Afire (2023), directed by Christian Petzold, with Thomas Schubert and Paula Beer in the lead roles, has been compared to the films of French nouvelle vague filmmaker Eric Rohmer. I was slightly familiar with Beer from Petzold's earlier Transit (2018). Schubert is a new discovery.
When Leon (Schubert) and his friend Felix arrive for what is envisioned as a working vacation at a cottage on the Baltic Sea owned by Felix’s mother, they find a mysterious young woman is also staying there and already settled in. Carefree Felix is a photographer putting together a portfolio for a school project but is easily distracted by the nearby beach, while grumpy, self-absorbed Leon is trying to finish his second novel. His efforts consist mostly of saying he has to work on it and sitting at a table staring at his computer. More often he is found staring out the window at the beguiling Nadja (Beer) as she hangs out in the backyard or bicycles off to the beach, where she works as seasonal help at the town hotel’s ice cream stand. Along the way we learn there is considerably more to her than first appears.
Leon is über-unlikable, the term "arsehole" coming up on multiple occasions, yet somehow bearable despite it, maybe because he knows he is an arsehole but just cannot help himself. Though enchanted from the moment he lays eyes on her, Leon instinctively rebuffs Nadja’s overtures toward friendship, and perhaps something more, then agonizes over it. As unlikable as he often is, there is something that draws Nadja, and this viewer, to him. Petzold gives us nothing about Leon’s background that might explain why he is as he is, in a story refreshingly free from facile pop psychology, therapeutic culture, or brain science for beginners.
The cast of characters is rounded out by Devid, a rescue swimmer who appears to be Nadja's boyfriend, and Leon’s editor who comes to town one weekend to discuss the novel with him. Soon enough it is Devid and Felix who are the couple. Nadja appears to be amused by this development, while the ever clueless Leon is baffled the revelation of his friend’s inclinations.
All of this plays out against the backdrop of a raging wildfire that leads to a tragic turn and a denouement that left me unsure exactly where things stand with Leon and Nadja but suggesting the possibility that Leon has found his better self.
Petzold is among our finest directors, with an impressive body of work that often features strong women characters, foremost those played by the nonpareil Nina Hoss in Barbara and Phoenix. Hoss, Beer, and Efira are well known and highly regarded in Europe, not so much in this country. Any film they are in is worth making an effort to see. I suspect that the same goes for Thomas Schubert.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt