Romance is what is conjured when one hears the phrase Paris memories. Postcard images of the Seine and The Eiffel Tower, lovers in public tryst. Put the title on a film and immediately romantic images congregate.

Indeed, Alice Winocour’s PARIS MEMORIES begins to play out like some rom-com as professional interpreter, Mia, has dinner with her medico partner truncated by a phone call summoning him to the hospital he works regarding some emergency or other.

Returning home alone on her motor bike she strikes torrential rain and decides to stop and take shelter in a bistro. Business is bustling and she is directed to a table at the rear.

The bistro is targeted by terrorists and a massacre ensues. Mia is among the handful of survivors.

Cue the move from rom com to police procedural or revenge tragedy, but no, PARIS MEMORIES becomes memorable as a movie about coping with trauma, about putting the pieces of your life back together after a puzzling and devastating disruption.

Months after the attack, Mia’s physical wounds are on the mend, an abdominal scar seared into her flesh the only visible evidence of her ordeal. But it is the invisible scars that blemish her life, the memories she remembers and the others that are a blur.

The trip wires and triggers of her trauma intrude her daily life, an existence that has been reset, restoration doubtful, rehabilitation resting on besting her partial amnesia.

Virginie Efira as Mia is remarkable, a natural, pure, complete performance, confident and confused, bewildered but determined, subdued but mesmerising. She commands the screen in every scene.

Stephane Fontaine’s fluid camera frames Paris in its inherent beauty, daylight and night, clear or rainy, the streets and skylines, the landmarks and the less known locales, images that glory in that glorious city.

With its extraordinary journey and revelations, its actions and reveries, and that superb central performance, PARIS MEMORIES will sear into your memory, lingering long and lively well after the lights come up.