The Frenchman Cedric Jimenez presented himself as a master of crime in the previous two films. “The Connection” (La French) and “Stronghold” (Bac Nord) were exceptional and high-quality stories about the fight against crime in Marseille during the French connection, i.e. during the seventies and eighties, and the drug problem in the largest French port city today. Again, Jimenez filmed a crime-thriller based on real events, but this time he moved from Marseille to Paris and “November” is a film that thematizes the most tragic event in modern French history, that is, the terrorist attack in Paris in November 2015, when Islamists in several parallel attack killed 130 people, mostly civilians.
Jimenez tells the story of these events from the perspective of the police, investigators and other services that, in the hours and days after the attack, tried to find out who the actors and facilitators of that terrorist act were. Given that the attack took place, it is immediately clear that the services failed, and one of the reasons can be seen in the prologue of the film set in Athens a few months before the attack. The special police there, led by the police anti-terrorist commander from France, Fred (Jean Dujardin), is trying to catch the terrorist. The wanted guy, that is, a member of ISIL who is recruiting members in France, will manage to escape, and then we move to France, and that’s on the night when the attacks took place.
Jimenez decided not to show the attacks and massacres themselves, but we follow what is happening from the experience of the policemen. We see a practically empty call center and a police control room with only one guy on duty. Suddenly the phones don’t stop ringing and we realize what happened and a frantic search for the perpetrators begins. Again, Jimenez made a dynamic and exciting film about the chase that will last for the next few days and it is shown in a realistic way what it looked like in those few endless days. And it is clear to us from the beginning that all these police officers, agents and investigators feel guilty about what happened and are aware that they have completely failed. And because of that, it will be, they want to make even greater efforts to find the perpetrators as soon as possible and prevent possible new attacks, and I have the feeling that the goal was not to go into the depth of the characters and rounding them off, but the basic intention was to show what was that chase like?
And in that, “November” certainly succeeds because it is dynamic, an exciting film with an extremely fast pace in which Jimenez gathered a first-class cast. Along with Oscar-winner Dujardin, Anais Demoustier, Sandrine Kiberlain and Jeremie Renier, all famous faces from French films, are also in the main roles. Although the quality of “November” lags behind Jimenez’s two previous films, it is a quality action thriller – a crime, an exciting and tense genre film that is exclusively interested in the police’s reaction to that horrific act. “November” succeeds in this, and if anyone was expecting a human drama, about the background, reasons and motives of the attacks or a story about the fate of those who perished in the attacks, they will have to wait for another film.