The kind of thriller that’s so caught up in its breathless, relentless race against the clock, it never fully stops to consider what it’s trying to say, November (Novembre) follows a crack team of French anti-terrorist agents as they attempt to catch the remaining culprits behind the devastating wave of attacks that hit Paris back in 2015.
Directed by France’s new resident action expert, Cédric Jimenez (The Stronghold, The Connection), and featuring an all-star cast that includes Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustier, Sandrine Kiberlain and Jérémie Renier, the film employs tons of energy and a fair amount of resources (the budget is listed at $13 million, which seems low compared to the high production values) to depict what happened in the five days between November 13th — when jihadists hit multiple targets in Paris, including the Bataclan concert hall — and the 18th, when the authorities tracked two of them down in the northern suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis.
November
The Bottom Line
A harrowing real-life manhunt that lacks heart.
Those two events bookend the movie and, in what’s perhaps his wisest directorial decision in November, Jimenez never shows the first one. Instead, after an opening chase scene where head agent Fred (Dujardin) loses the trace of a suspect in Greece several months earlier, we cut to the anti-terrorist team’s headquarters in Paris as the Bataclan attack begins. A lone agent on a nightshift receives a phone call at the office. Suddenly, dozens of other phones start ringing, and it’s clear that something major has gone down.
The art of suggestion implied by that early sequence is completely absent from the rest of the film, which follows Fred and fellow agent Ines (Demoustier), as well as the office-bound Héloise (Kiberlain) and Marco (Renier), while they scramble like mad to find the two shooters who managed to escape. We see every door the cops kick down, every phone they tap, every suspect they interrogate and every false lead they follow, with DP Nicolas Loir’s camera forever fixed to a Steadicam rig as he tries to keep up with a cast that keeps rushing ahead of him to nab the bad guys.
Jimenez and writer Olivier Demangel (who also penned the Omar Sy film Father and Soldier, premiering in Un Certain Regard) seem obsessed with verisimilitude, shooting in the actual locations where events occurred and sticking closely to the real investigation. There is a docudrama side to November that’s well-executed by both cast and crew, but beyond that, what is the film about? Well, not much.
The model here seems to be Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which recreated the ten-year hunt for Osama bin Laden in thrilling ways. But it also asked bigger questions about America’s place in a post-9/11 world, the moral implications of torture and the existential meaning of accomplishing your mission without having anywhere to turn next. Such matters are mostly absent from November, except, perhaps, in a few scenes dealing with Samia (the excellent Lyna Khoudri), a Muslim girl who decides to turn in her own roommate (Sarah Afchain), suspicious that she has links to the terrorists.
It turns out to be a major lead for Fred and Ines, and the latter is obliged to lie to Samia to get what she needs. That moment provides a brief shred of human drama in what’s otherwise a film fueled more by adrenaline than brainpower. There’s also some confusion as to who’s who and what’s what, with Jimenez never providing titles or explanations. We don’t even know the name of the service that Fred heads up — it seems to be the SDAT (Sous-direction anti-terrorist) — nor what kind of chain of command he’s working under. All we know is that there are lots of people running around, driving around or slaving away all night at their desks. Does anyone ever sleep or eat?
Such an approach has its limits, although it can also pay off at times, especially during a harrowing, edge-of-your-seat sequence after the cops finally corner the jihadists in their tiny Saint-Denis hideout, and all hell breaks loose. According to reports at the time, nearly 5,000 bullets were fired during the nighttime raid by French authorities, and you can be sure Jimenez includes every single one of them in his movie.
In a similar fashion, the director flexed his action muscles in his Marseille-set The Stronghold, which was a local hit in 2020, rallying audiences back to theaters, and which featured several breathtaking set-pieces but also seemed to blindly get behind the French police at the expense of everyone else. (Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen tweeted for people to go see a film that revealed the “terrible reality” of Marseille.)
November adapts the sole point of view of law enforcement agents as well, but the real problem is that we never get to know who these people are behind the uniform. By limiting itself to a nonstop five-day chase, the film ultimately limits its scope. At best we can go along for the ride, stepping on the gas and never bothering to look behind us.