The filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta moves and sows doubts with his film about the Bataclan attack, based on the book by the survivor Ramón González Paz, love and death metal. Just released, One Year, One Night raises questions because, far from serving the audience a coherent account of the consequences of that night in November 2015, it prefers to offer a mosaic of impressions that are as believable on their own as they are discordant as a whole. .
In fact, among other topics, Lacuesta addresses here the issue of invented memories. Invented either because we evoke a truth that got lost in the labyrinth of memory or because of the need to deny a reality that we don’t want to face.
How are others going to understand us if we don’t remember the same thing?
–And who wants to understand us?
This dialogue between the protagonists, unable to remember the details of that tragic night a few months later, suggests the difficulty of overcoming post-traumatic stress in the company of the other victims, the arduous social reintegration. But also the impossibility of establishing a single and indisputable truth, especially if it refers to facts lived on the surface. And the doubt, too, about whether that truth really interests someone.
The author of this article has an experience related to those attacks. Along with fifty other journalists, I spent the entire night from November 13 to 14 sheltered behind the police cordon on Boulevard Voltaire, corner of Richard-Lenoir, about 200 meters from the concert hall, sending texts and videos to this newspaper. Shortly after hearing loud detonations – we would later learn that they were caused by the police to subdue the terrorists – information began to circulate that the President of the Republic and the mayor of Paris were going to pass by the place where we were by car.
We didn’t get to see them, because in the end they accessed the place through another avenue. I still do not know if the decision to divert them had to do with information that emerged a few days later: in the same space that we journalists occupied, next to the police cordon, the presence of the mastermind of the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was detected. His purposes were unknown, if he intended to immolate himself (again in the face of the authorities) or if he only responded to the pattern of the psychopath who comes to delight in the contemplation of his masterpiece.
When the news got out, I tried to remember the people who came up behind us to poke around, most of them from nearby restaurants and bars. And, somehow, the image of a lanky, dark-haired young man, who behind us watched everything with an ironic smile, was fixed in my memory. I have never been able to clear up the doubt as to whether he was really there, with his features similar to those of the murderer, or whether it was an invented memory like the ones recounted by the protagonists of the film, the result of the emotional disturbance of a different night. I lean more towards the second.
Among other achievements, Lacuesta, in this exquisite film, tells a story of the demolition of absolute truths. The film leads us to think about Tzvetan Todorov’s distinction between literal memory and exemplary memory and, above all, about his criticism of sacred memory.
In our bubble society, compartmentalized into cells by social networks, there is a tendency to transmit history based on testimonies that seem irrefutable, without properly assessing the weakness of memory. Each bubble contains its own truth, preserved among the adepts so that it is not contaminated by the truth of others.
That is why the plots built through characters that are pure confusion and paradox are worthy of appreciation. Like the very fact of living.
