November review – replay of Bataclan terror response is good PR for French cops
Artistic responses to the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks – including You Will Not Have My Hate, Paris Memories and the excellent You Resemble Me – have rightly erred on the side of the contemplative, though even that couldn’t excuse last year’s soft-rock stage musical For You I’d Wait. With November, the director and co-writer Cédric Jiminez, who excavated the origins of The French Connection in his 2014 thriller The Connection, zeroes in on the police operation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks when the terrorists were still on the run. Jiminez’s Connection star Jean Dujardin oversees the hunt, calling his wife to say “Give the kids my love” before five solid days of barking at suspects and pointing at maps.
Deploying the standard Jason Bourne vocabulary of swish-pans, shaky-cam and jittery editing, the film mercifully avoids restaging the attacks themselves and instead catalogues the surveillance operations, false leads, interrogations and high-speed pursuits. Despite reliable work from a wirylooking Jérémie Renier as a scowling cop and Anaïs Demoustier as a novice agent, we don’t get to know much about these (fictional) heroes who are pulling pizza-and-Alka-Seltzer all-nighters. A gun-runner (Hugo Dillon) with a colourful if dubious defence – “Don’t blame my Kalashnikovs, blame pussy politicians!” he fumes – comes more sharply into focus than anyone else here.
Aside from one moment when Dujardin loses his cool and roughs up a suspect who has threatened to kill his family and “infidel wife”, the cops here are a uniformly diligent and conscientious bunch. Any errors are shown to be wholly understandable, and even the near-betrayal of a key witness is later explained to have brought about a change in the law, which is quite the silver lining. As a thriller, November is slick, functional and rather hollow. As a PR exercise for French law enforcement, it’s exemplary.
• November is released on 22 June at Ciné Lumière, London.