Aftermath

I want to say at the outset that I’m not quite recommending the films I talk about here. They are decent films that make you think, well done treatments of their difficult subject, but you have to be in a certain frame of mind to see them. So I would not suggest them for the casual viewer.

A decade or so ago, I happened to be in Montreal on my own with some time to kill. I speak a bit of French, so I decided to go to a movie without subtitles to see whether I understood it. I was mostly doing it as an exercise or a lark, and more focused on looking for the language label rather than the content of the film—otherwise, I might have picked up on the fact that it was about the notorious mass shooting in Québec in 1989. The film’s title, Polytechnique, gave an obvious clue but was also ambiguous enough to lure me into the theater unaware.

I started crying a few minutes into the movie and did not stop until after it was over. I don’t remember many details of the narrative anymore, how much of it was devoted to the incident itself and how much to the aftermath. I don’t remember much about the people it focused on, or what their arcs were in the story, or how they interpreted what happened to them. There is only one scene that really stays with me—a devastating one where the shooter separates men from women and sends the male students out of the room. Apart from that, it’s a near-complete blur, and I doubt I will go back and revisit it after the harrowing first viewing. So a blur it remains.

I had an echo of this experience this spring, when I was flying back from Copenhagen after the trip I took that sparked the idea for this newsletter. As my kids watched some Marvel movie or other on their small screens, I clicked on the icon for a French movie I did not know anything about, Revoir Paris. The drama turned out to be about a woman recovering after a devastating terrorist attack—a very thinly-veiled stand-in for the November 2015 attacks at the Bataclan theater and elsewhere around Paris. The story is mostly focused on the aftermath of the attack and how it difficult it is for the main character, Mia, to return to her old life. Although her husband wants to support her, she moves further and further away from him, toward other people present for the attack, who can help piece together exactly what happened and make some sense of it. She had only gone to the restaurant involved by accident, stopping there to get out of the rain, but that one small decision changed the course of her life.

Revoir Paris reminded me of another film in this vein, 22 July, which is about the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway, in Oslo and on Utøya Island.

22 July also focuses on the aftermath of the attack, and the recovery of one of the victims, Viljar Hanssen, who was shot several times on Utøya. While Revoir Paris unfolds like a mystery, slowly getting closer to a full picture of the event, 22 July shows the attack up front, but afterwards presents a contrast between the shooter, Breivik, and the victim, Hanssen, in terms of their certainties and power of will. The viewer follows both as Breivik prepares his defense and Hanssen works up the physical and mental toughness to confront his attacker in court. Although at first it seems as though Breivik is the more certain and forceful of the two, his understanding of himself and the reasons behind the attack undergo some tremors and his mask starts to slip. Is he really part of a mass movement that will take back Norway, or is he a man with psychiatric problems who was a bit too lonely growing up? Hanssen naturally feels overwhelmed and uncertain, unsure what his life can be like now that he has lost his best friends and his youthful faith in the world. Confronting Breivik and putting him in his lowly, ignoble place becomes a rallying point for his recovery.

It is notable to me that I have seen several of these sorts of films now from other countries, but have either not found or not been drawn to their American equivalent. Perhaps mass shootings happen here too frequently for them to work as drama? Or at least for me to seek them out as drama? It feels like France and Norway—not to mention our neighbor to the north—are at least united in the horror these attacks provoke, and in the attempt to prevent their recurrence. Whereas the political system here encourages such attacks. We are routinely treated to the spectacle of GOP politicians blaming everything but the proliferation of guns for our epidemic of gun violence. It might be hard to convey what shattering events mass shootings are in a production where you also have to address the extreme cynicism of the U.S. context.

I have had Revoir Paris in my head in the last couple of weeks, because the Tribe of Nova portion of the Hamas attack seemed reminiscent of the Bataclan attack in Paris. That movie and the feelings it evokes pulls these other films and observations in its wake.