NOVEMBER
*****
Director: Cédric Jimenez
Screenplay: Olivier Demangel and Cédric Jimenez
Principal cast:
Jean Dujardin
Anaïs Demoustier
Sandrine Kiberlain
Jérémie Renier
Lyna Khoudri
Cédric Kahn
Country: France
Classification: M
Runtime: 106 mins.
Australian release date: 11 May 2023.
French director Cédric Jimenez is known for high-action movies like The Connection and The Stronghold but with his latest drama, November, he has excelled himself. It grabs you by the throat from the moment it starts through to the final credits and the fact that it’s based on the actions of the security forces in the days immediately after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks makes it even more electrifying. While the names and personalities of the chief protagonists have been changed to protect their identities - with the exception of the names of the terrorists – great care was taken by the scriptwriters, Jimenez and Olivier Demangel, to accurately portray the processes followed by the actual police and security involved in the hunt for the remaining members of the terrorist cell… and the intensity of those five days. The security forces knew that there were still two attackers loose on the streets of the city and suspected that they were planning another attack, but how do you find two needles in a haystack of two million people?
November begins in Athens, Greece, some months before the Parisian outrages, where Fred (Jean Dujardin), a high-ranking member of France’s anti-terrorist police, SDAT, is working with his Greek counterparts in an attempt to capture an Islamic terrorist, but the raid fails and the target escapes. Back in Paris 10 months later, on the night of November 13th, every phone at SDAT headquarters starts ringing and Fred and his colleagues are immediately called in to put together teams to track down the perpetrators of multiple murderous attacks on the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, the Bataclan theatre and other sites across the city. Thus, the viewer is instantly drawn into the heart of this operation and, for the next hour-and-a-half, never released. In essence, Jimenez is treating the audience as though it was in on the action, in the same way that the security personnel were at the time – nobody went home, slept or had contact with their families until the operation was over five days later and Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his co-conspirators were dead (Abaaoud was the man being hunted at the film’s outset). During this time, Nicolas Loir’s hand-held camera never rests either, and the close proximity of his lens to the action keeps us in the thick of things.
While going for realism, the roles played by Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustiers (Captain Inès Moreau) and Sandrine Kiberlain (Héloïse) are each inspired by several real police officers. Throughout November, co-scriptwriter Demangel has emphasised the collective energy of the various people and groups involved so, unlike a classic ‘thriller’ construction, there isn’t a single lead or ‘hero’ figure. This diversification adds to the almost documentary feel of the movie. He says, “The characters are at the service of the film, as the police officers were at the service of the investigation. A sprawling investigation, thousands of minutes, hearings, cross-checks, testimonies. The characters wander and stumble in the night. They look, they can’t find anything, they start over. It was their decisions that conditioned the writing, not their psychology. And I tried to stick to the way that the SDAT works. They are extremely rigorous police officers with regard to procedure.”
In making November, Jimenez has wisely avoided trying to recreate the atrocities of that November night, concentrating solely on the aftermath of the events. It’s a decision that has made his film more powerful than it would have been had he gone down that route; by treating the events purely as a police procedural and stripping it of anything extraneous to the manhunt, he has crafted an incredibly tense and gripping drama, one of the year’s best.
Screenplay: Olivier Demangel and Cédric Jimenez
Principal cast:
Jean Dujardin
Anaïs Demoustier
Sandrine Kiberlain
Jérémie Renier
Lyna Khoudri
Cédric Kahn
Country: France
Classification: M
Runtime: 106 mins.
Australian release date: 11 May 2023.
French director Cédric Jimenez is known for high-action movies like The Connection and The Stronghold but with his latest drama, November, he has excelled himself. It grabs you by the throat from the moment it starts through to the final credits and the fact that it’s based on the actions of the security forces in the days immediately after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks makes it even more electrifying. While the names and personalities of the chief protagonists have been changed to protect their identities - with the exception of the names of the terrorists – great care was taken by the scriptwriters, Jimenez and Olivier Demangel, to accurately portray the processes followed by the actual police and security involved in the hunt for the remaining members of the terrorist cell… and the intensity of those five days. The security forces knew that there were still two attackers loose on the streets of the city and suspected that they were planning another attack, but how do you find two needles in a haystack of two million people?
November begins in Athens, Greece, some months before the Parisian outrages, where Fred (Jean Dujardin), a high-ranking member of France’s anti-terrorist police, SDAT, is working with his Greek counterparts in an attempt to capture an Islamic terrorist, but the raid fails and the target escapes. Back in Paris 10 months later, on the night of November 13th, every phone at SDAT headquarters starts ringing and Fred and his colleagues are immediately called in to put together teams to track down the perpetrators of multiple murderous attacks on the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, the Bataclan theatre and other sites across the city. Thus, the viewer is instantly drawn into the heart of this operation and, for the next hour-and-a-half, never released. In essence, Jimenez is treating the audience as though it was in on the action, in the same way that the security personnel were at the time – nobody went home, slept or had contact with their families until the operation was over five days later and Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his co-conspirators were dead (Abaaoud was the man being hunted at the film’s outset). During this time, Nicolas Loir’s hand-held camera never rests either, and the close proximity of his lens to the action keeps us in the thick of things.
While going for realism, the roles played by Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustiers (Captain Inès Moreau) and Sandrine Kiberlain (Héloïse) are each inspired by several real police officers. Throughout November, co-scriptwriter Demangel has emphasised the collective energy of the various people and groups involved so, unlike a classic ‘thriller’ construction, there isn’t a single lead or ‘hero’ figure. This diversification adds to the almost documentary feel of the movie. He says, “The characters are at the service of the film, as the police officers were at the service of the investigation. A sprawling investigation, thousands of minutes, hearings, cross-checks, testimonies. The characters wander and stumble in the night. They look, they can’t find anything, they start over. It was their decisions that conditioned the writing, not their psychology. And I tried to stick to the way that the SDAT works. They are extremely rigorous police officers with regard to procedure.”
In making November, Jimenez has wisely avoided trying to recreate the atrocities of that November night, concentrating solely on the aftermath of the events. It’s a decision that has made his film more powerful than it would have been had he gone down that route; by treating the events purely as a police procedural and stripping it of anything extraneous to the manhunt, he has crafted an incredibly tense and gripping drama, one of the year’s best.