Seven years after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the cinema is beginning to take hold of this subject. November is one of the works addressing the period in the most direct way. This film by Cédric Jimenez (North Bac – 2.2 million admissions), one of the most anticipated of the fall, recounts five days of feverish police tracking in search of the terrorists of November 13. This thrilling thriller with Sandrine Kiberlain and Jean Dujardin, will be released in theaters on Wednesday October 5th.
November looks back at the deadliest attacks ever perpetrated on French soil, with 130 dead in one evening in Paris and Ile-de-France. “A trauma of incredible violence“, who makes this film “important“, declared Cédric Jimenez during the presentation (out of competition) of the film at the Cannes festival, in May.
Director Cédric Jimenez admits he hesitated to broach the subject of November 13, but let himself be convinced by Olivier Demangel’s screenplay, which leaves the attacks themselves completely off-screen. The screenwriter initiated the project in 2017, with the idea of ”tell the shock wave” which followed the tragedy. A point of view which also reassured Sandrine Kiberlain, who confessed her “reluctance“initially to accept the role of Héloïse, who heads the counter-terrorism sub-directorate of the judicial police,”in relation to the proximity of the facts“.
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Result: the film is in total immersion with the police, which starts in the middle of the evening of November 13 and ends five days later, after the attack on Saint-Denis, where the terrorists are taking refuge. Stressed phone calls, police custody and muscular searches follow one another. Yawns and bloodshed at times betray the fatigue of the characters, under pressure to find the most wanted men in France before they commit other attacks.
Like the police after the attacks, the characters of November are in a “tunnel“, “hasinvestigation service“: The film shows nothing of their private life or their feelings. The director wanted the characters not to share any intimacy with their loved ones during this hunt, “because that’s really what they lived 24 hours a day without interruption“. The only scenes where the emotion of the massacre that was November 13, 2015 emerges are those of the interrogation of the survivors in the hospital.
Cybersurveillance, the expertise of the police just a few months after the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher, and technological tools are little compared to intuition, which allows the character of Inès (Anaïs Demoustier) to trust the key witness in the case, despite the implausibility of his statements. This witness, played by Lyna Khoudri, is inspired by “Sonia“, the young woman who allowed the police to locate the leader of the November 13 commandos and now lives with the status of a protected witness under a false identity.
This woman was at the heart of a showdown: renamed Samia on screen, the character wears an Islamic veil, which does not correspond to reality, complained “Sonia“, who, after going to court, obtained an amicable mention from the producers to provide this clarification.