Paris Terror Attacks: The Storm and the Horror

November 13, 2015 for France is comparable to September 11, 2001 in America.

A terrorist attack that attempted to hit several targets at once shocked free societies.

At that time, 130 people died on the streets of Paris and especially in the Bataclan concert hall, leaving many more injured and traumatized.

The processing of this event has long since started, there are many films and books on the subject.

Now the film "November" by Cédric Jimenez tries to reconstruct five days around the attacks from the perspective of the police.

The story “reste une fiction”, it says at the beginning in an insert, despite all the closeness to the actual events, in important aspects the freedom of the better, more compact, pointed story prevails compared to the complexity of what happened in the night on March 14. November and the days that followed in the apparatuses of the French executive.

An incredible storm

Jimenez struggles to put five days of an "incredible storm" into a relatable form.

He relies on the classic means of the thriller: characters in conflict, competing levels of action, plus the entire inventory of the genre from night observations to heated interrogations.

The internal hierarchy is reflected in the filling of the most important roles.

The focus is on the policeman Fred (Jean Dujardin, made famous with the espionage satire "OSS 117" and then in 2011 with the meta-silent film "The Artist").

He manages a large department, he is always brief and unsentimental in his motivational speeches, but he is not a desk worker, he is close to every access, and if necessary he flies quickly to Morocco to question a witness.

"November" programmatically begins with an action sequence ten months before the crucial date.

In Athens, a terrorist slips through the fingers of the French units, at that time, of course, no one could foresee what was really at stake above the rooftops of the Greek capital (visually the suggestion is obviously aimed at the fact that Athens is not far from Syria, where at that time the "Islamic State" militia instigated and committed new acts of violence against "crusaders").

Between two women

In the dramaturgy of "November" Fred stands between two women.

Héloise (Sandrine Kiberlain) is a level above him, while Ines (Anais Demoustier) is his subordinate.

She makes a mistake at the beginning, she endangers a maneuver of another department by acting on her own authority.

After that, she is counted, and it must first be clarified again how much one can build on her work.

For his part, however, Fred is by no means always clear about the best way to proceed.

The panic over a conceivable further attack, which is fueled scornfully by witnesses during questioning, makes every action appear extremely urgent.

Fred also occasionally overshoots the bounds of acceptable behavior, his natural authority (which Jean Dujardin effortlessly makes believable) occasionally turning into naked anger.

At this point, the film "November" is critical, it doesn't really get into this central problem, which left an inglorious trail of illegal state action in America throughout the "War on Terror".

A witness as a key figure

For this, Jimenez probably should have included the official reactions more.

From time to time you can see then-President Hollande speaking on a screen in the background, but the discourse of official France and the dirty reality of a system that is at least momentarily powerless diverge in “November”.

So Jimenez didn't make a political film, but primarily an action genre piece that also touches on the dilemmas of state self-defense.

A witness from one of the many anonymous apartment towers in Paris eventually becomes a key figure.

She claims that a terrorist thought dead (by bombings from a Mirage, the fighter jet whose name is proudly named) is not only still alive, but is to be found in the heart of Paris.

It's Ines who shines again, this time with her intuition: I know women like Samia, she claims, women from the suburbs who rarely have the courage to go to the police.

The fate of this informant (for whom there was no suitable leniency program) is ultimately what “November” is all about.

As much as the film “remains a fiction”, it still sees itself in the continuity of a public learning process, and so in the end there is at least legislative progress alongside an unfortunate commando operation.

"November" changes level in the credits with a few written lines - and thus affirms the superiority of a democratic system that always emerges mature from a storm.