The overwhelming drama “Revoir Paris” by Alice Winocour, the breathtaking thriller “Novembre” by Cédric Jimenez with Jean Dujardin, or even “You will not have my hatred” adapted from the book by Antoine Leiris… The cinema is interest at the end of the year in the attacks of November 13, 2015. Whether from the point of view of survivors, relatives or the police, the trauma is universal.
November 13, 2015: shock, fear, amazement. Paris and Saint-Denis are the target of terrorist attacks in the evening killing 130 people and injuring hundreds. Seven years following the tragedy, and while the trial of Salah Abdeslam and his co-defendants ended a few weeks ago following ten months of hearing, the 7th art tries through images and words to tell the unspeakable. Everyone has their own way.
In “Revoir Paris”, selected this year for the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at the 75th Cannes Film Festival and still in theaters, Alice Winocour aims her camera at the survivors, and more particularly at Mia, embodied by the disturbing and luminous Virginie Efira. The evening of the attack, the young woman, a biker, had taken refuge in a Parisian brasserie while waiting for the storm to pass, while Thomas (Benoît Magimel) celebrated his birthday, surrounded by his colleagues. In a fraction of a second, Mia finds herself face down in the middle of the bodies, while the assailants, of whom we only see the feet, are on the lookout for the slightest gesture, their finger on their machine gun. Months pass, and the trauma is there. This survivor does not remember anything. So she tries to reconstruct the puzzle of this tragic evening by returning to the scene with a support group. This is where Mia will meet the gaze of Thomas who hasn’t forgotten anything, and will help her in her quest for reconstruction, in her thirst for (re)living.
“My brother was at the Bataclan, confides the filmmaker who imagined a fictitious attack to serve his story. While he was in hiding, I stayed in a text message with him part of the night. (…) The film was constructed from the memories of this traumatic event, then from my brother’s story in the days following the attack. I experimented on myself how memory deconstructed, and very often reconstructed events”.
The desire to film the “off-camera” attacks
Also presented out of competition at Cannes, “November” by Cédric Jimenez (“Bac Nord”), which will be released in cinemas on October 5, tackles this sensitive subject from the point of view of the police. Because the screenwriter Olivier Demangel wished, as he explained on the Croisette to AFP, “to tell the shock wave” following the tragedy, “this moment when the public services are mobilized so that society holds firm”. Worn by Jean DujardinAnaïs Demoustier and Sandrine Kiberlain, this thriller reconstructs the five-day hunt led by the teams of the counter-terrorism sub-directorate of the judicial police to identify and neutralize the two Islamist terrorists on the run, Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his accomplice Chakib Akrouh.
As in “Revoir Paris”, the objective of this feature film is not to show these attacks, but on the contrary to film them “off screen”. The danger is there, the tension is palpable, but the shootings are never visible on the screen. “I would have found that obscene. What I liked was that it was the opposite point of view. We did not stage the attacks, nor the victims, ”explains Cédric Jimenez in the production notes.
Return to these facts without ever falling into sensationalism. To film with modesty these beings in distress. While director Alice Winocour depicts the psychological and physical following-effects of survivors, who often feel guilty for still being alive, the drama “You will not have my hatred”, which will be unveiled on November 2, focuses more on the suffering of loved ones, those who lost this evening of November 13, 2015 a brother, a mother, a friend or a wife, as was the case for Antoine Leiris. The story of this journalist, played by Pierre Deladonchamps, gave rise to a book from which a play was adapted, then this film by the German Kilian Riedho, who adopts “the point of view of an empathic friend and refused to “give the aggressors more space than necessary.”
While bathing his 17-month-old little Melvil, Antoine Lieris saw his wife Hélène (Camélia Jordana) leave for the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan, without suspecting that he would never see her once more. There, in the doorway, she was saying goodbye to him without knowing it. Three days following the attacks, this devastated but dignified man posted an open letter on Facebook, titled “You won’t get my hate.” The text will be shared thousands of times in just a few hours, and taken up by the daily Le Monde. But if the whole world raised him at that time to the rank of “hero”, Antoine Leiris tried to mourn as best he might and to survive for his son. Because as he wrote to the terrorists who stole the “love of his life” from him: “Every day and all his life this little boy will insult you by being happy and free”. Without anger or hatred. To let happiness back into his life.
