During a traumatic event, your body switches into fight or flight mode, adrenaline and cortisol coursing. Higher brain functions shut down, including the processing of long-term memory. Which is why people who’ve been through terrible events can sometimes have no memory of it, or only fragments, or can’t remember things until long after. This part of recovery, dealing with remembering or not remembering, is what the film Paris Memories is about.
Mia is sitting in a restaurant when there is a terrorist attack. In the aftermath, everyone wants her to talk about it, to support her with what she’s been through. It seems impossible to communicate to them that she doesn’t know what she’s been through. She doesn’t remember any of it.
At first there are just ghosts, folk she passed in the hall, faces of people she saw, appearing like afterimages in her daily life. When she starts to meet other survivors, she gets snatches of sensations, sounds, glimpses, the feeling of someone holding her hand.
Paris Memories is about the long shadow cast by trauma, how its impact is not simply in its immediate effect, but in how it disrupts people’s very sense of self. Virginie Efira is amazing as ever, but it suffers from the French need to crowbar l’amour into every story.