A Rendez-vous with Virginie Efira: The French Film Festival Returns

While many quibble with this year’s Oscar list for its lack of female directors, this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema; a yearly event hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, features two women with superb films. For Opening Night, Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, translating to Paris Memories, stars this year’s Cesar winner for Best Actress, Virginie Efira. As Mia, she is the survivor of a terrorist attack in a Parisian café where nearly everyone was murdered. Mia, understandably, cannot return to life as usual, to her apartment, her boyfriend, her job in media, a Russian translator. Rather, haunted, she revisits the scene finding healing as she bonds with other survivors. While these emotions are tenderly evoked, Winocour does not skimp on the violence, the shooters seen from Mia’s eye view as she somehow fails to be hit. These scenes are nail-bitingly intense, explosive.

Introducing her movie, Alice Winocour explained, she was not just exploring a random moment in the Zeitgeist. Who has not imagined oneself in such a terrifying circumstance? Her little brother was present at the Bataclan on November 13, 2015, when hundreds were gunned down. Interviewing many survivors, Winocour knew Mia’s trauma all too well.

At the opening night soiree, Director Rebecca Zlotowski sipped champagne with Virginie Efira, her star in Other People’s Children. Here Efira plays Rachel, a young woman who falls for Ali, a married man—well, estranged from his wife (Chiara Mastroanni in the role). While she’s hoping for a lasting relationship, she wants desperately to have a baby; her gynecologist, played by documentarian Frederick Wiseman, insists, her time is running out. Rachel becomes involved with Ali’s daughter who accepts Rachel to a point. The film keenly observes what happens in this woman’s life when her desire for motherhood is not fulfilled, and, by contrast, how the pull of children works in men.

And while the terrorist attack in Revoir Paris evades justice, the theme is relevant for the crime film, The Night of the 12^th, which won this year’s Cesar for Best Picture, and Best Director for Dominik Moll. A girl is torched in the middle of the night in a small town near Grenoble. A special police unit is sent to solve the case, a barbaric act with no motive. But the girl’s best friend sums up the mystery: she was murdered for being a girl.