Understandably, the terrorist assaults in Paris on the night time of November 13, 2015 have been handled with nice sensitivity by the French movie business, and the one different movie within the Cannes Movie Pageant’s lineup this yr to the touch on these occasions — Alice Winocour’s Paris Revoir — is a calmly fictionalized drama set within the aftermath of the night time 130 individuals had been killed, most of them at a rock live performance on the metropolis’s Bataclan nightclub. Although many names have been modified, for apparent safety causes, Cedric Jimenez’s Novembre is, in contrast, a heavy-artillery just-the-facts-ma’am police procedural detailing the manhunt that adopted within the subsequent 5 days.
The Cannes out-of-competition movie begins in a fairly surprisingly low-key approach, following a girl jogging the banks of the Seine as David Bowie’s mournful early Nineteen Seventies cowl “Sorrow” performs. The occasions of the night time play out on display screen, and although, fairly rightly, we’re not proven any of the carnage, we do discover out that the jogger, Ines (Anaïs Demoustier), is an off-duty cop with town’s anti-terrorist group, and her shock when she will get a name from the group is a neat approach of exhibiting simply how unhealthy information actually travels. Within the workplace, Fred (Jean Dujardin) and Héloise (Sandrine Kiberlain) are charged with the unimaginable process of discovering the individuals liable for the shootings, utilizing CCTV footage, in-person surveillance and telephone wires to analyze a terror community with hyperlinks to Brussels.
For probably the most half, that is superior reconstruction stuff, a lot in order that Dujardin quickly disappears into a job that’s largely exposition, pointing at maps and footage on pin boards, and shouting at subordinates in a beneficiant, avuncular approach. The navy side is barely disturbingly fetishized; although Fred’s division is clearly on the appropriate aspect of historical past, the Hollywood-blockbuster photos of faceless police in black riot gear don’t precisely make it appear like the cavalry is coming, which is whenever you may understand that you simply’re not watching a run-of-the-mill Netflix true-crime drama. The shootouts are brutal, and although essential to the story, their presentation is a bit counterintuitive in a movie that’s predicated on the preservation of peace in a non-violent society.
Fortunately, there are glimmers of humanity, and simply when it appears that evidently there may be no nuance in any respect to this efficient however to date prosaic movie, Jimenez pivots to the story of Samia (the unbelievable Lyna Khoudri Samia), a younger do-gooder at a homeless camp who has critical intel: her flatmate is bankrolling her cousin, one of many terrorists.
That is the place Novembre takes off; Fred and Héloise put strain on Ines to ship the suspect by any means, and the movie strikes out in a slight totally different route. Till now, it has been about guidelines, accountability and the total weight of the regulation — however in an summary approach. Now, with Samia being strong-armed and frightened, we see how these issues influence on regular individuals, how civic responsibility is all effectively and good till you attempt to truly do it.
Novembre doesn’t provide any new insights into what occurred, and neither does it dwell on that. What’s good about it’s that displays on classes discovered, giving credit score the place it’s due — discovering terrorists in right now’s world is near-impossible process, so the achievements the French made that week are unbelievable — but it surely additionally isn’t afraid to seek out fault, noting the injustices that may and do occur, mockingly, within the pursuit of justice itself.
