‘November’ Review: Slick French Thriller Is Less a Call to Remember Than an Appeal to Relax
23.05.2022 - 01:43
/ variety.com
Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt took the French police just five days to catch the men responsible for the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks on Paris. In the meantime, the country was put on high alert: President François Hollande declared war on Daesh (ISIS), and police were given carte blanche to bring the terrorists to justice.
For those five days in November — the same period dramatized in French director Cedric Jimenez’s ticking-clock thriller “November” — the terrorists seemed to have achieved their purpose.France was traumatized. I know because I was there, ordered to stay indoors, afraid that this might be just the beginning. Like nearly everyone I spoke to, I was desperate to get out, if only to show the terrorists that they hadn’t won, that we would not live in fear.
And yet, the incident had touched a nerve. We were all deeply, irreparably scared. Jimenez (who previously conceived “The French Connection” reverse-shot crime saga “The French”) seems to remember things differently.
With “November,” he has made a patriotic tribute to the French police, casting some of the local industry’s top stars — Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustier, Sandrine Kiberlain, Jérémie Renier — as key players in the operation mobilized to track and capture the terrorists. Things did not go perfectly. There was no shortage of false leads, dead ends and lives lost, some of which Jimenez and screenwriter Olivier Demangel acknowledge.
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