‘Revoir Paris’ review: After a terrorist attack, a survivor searches for closure but the movie stays on the surface

Barely two months have passed since Chicago audiences saw “Other People’s Children,” starring the busy and reliably excellent Virginie Efira. Her instincts locate the tenderness in both drama and light comedy — often in the same instant. That French export, a good one, was distributed stateside by Chicago’s Music Box Films.

Now, Music Box is circulating another recent pickup starring Efira. “Revoir Paris,” which translates as “Paris Memories,” finds Efira working as thoughtfully and effectively as ever. The film itself is frustrating, however, and more than a little specious in its glossy narrative treatment of a fatal terrorist attack, based on the 2015 Islamic State assaults all across Paris.

The opening minutes of writer-director Alice Winocour’s drama, continuing through July 13 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, shows Mia (Efira) going about her life, unaware of what we know is soon to occur. She works as a Russian translator; one evening, she meets her surgeon lover Vincent (Grégoire Colin) for a late dinner at a bistro, though the rendezvous is interrupted by a work text calling the surgeon back to the hospital. On the way home, Mia ducks into a different bistro to get out of the rain. Suddenly, gunfire. Bodies on the floor. Glass everywhere.

Mia survives the attack. Many others do not, and the rest of “Revoir Paris” follows Mia through a process of dazed recovery that turns into a detective story. Three months after the attack, Mia’s memories of what happened that night remain fractured and elusive. But without warning, certain things — the sight of candles on a birthday cake, for example — crystallize, fleetingly, a memory of the attack.

A survivors group convenes at the bistro, and it’s at once eye-opening and too much to bear for Mia, especially after a fellow survivor accuses Mia of having hidden behind a locked door in the bistro restroom. Two fellow survivors set Mia’s course for something like a real recovery. One is Thomas (Benoît Magimel), a rumpled charmer whose leg has been badly injured. The other, kitchen worker Assane (Amadou Mbow), remains a cipher until near the end of the film, difficult to locate. For Mia, he’s the key to this post-traumatic recovery period; they survived the attack together, hiding, holding hands while listening to the horrific sounds of the dead and dying.

To say writer-director Winocour is good with trauma sounds like a backhanded compliment, but unfortunately it applies to “Revoir Paris.” (Her resume includes the film “Disorder,” about an ex-soldier living with post-traumatic stress disorder.) There’s considerable craft underneath everything she does, even when her script indulges in some sentimentally manipulative plotting in the later stages. But there’s a whiff of exceptionalism, of survivor’s guilt blithely ignored, in the way the movie glides along, dominated by beautiful close-ups of a beautiful star. The use of recent tragic events for a protagonist’s personal growth becomes more and more dubious, in ways recalling both indie and mainstream American attempts to dramatize the fallout of 9/11.

While many will find “Revoir Paris” moving, for me it’s because the performances do the heavy lifting, effortlessly, while the material lays everything out too neatly. The mess of life, the anguish of what Mia is going through, deserves a clear-eyed exploration and a little less gloss.

“Revoir Paris” — 2 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (violence)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Through July 13 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org; in French with English subtitles.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune