Cannes Review: Jean Dujardin In Cedric Jimenez’s ‘Novembre’
deadline.comUnderstandably, the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of November 13, 2015 have been treated with great sensitivity by the French film industry, and the only other film in the Cannes Film Festival’s lineup this year to touch on those events — Alice Winocour’s Paris Revoir — is a lightly fictionalized drama set in the aftermath of the night 130 people were killed, most of them at a rock concert at the city’s Bataclan nightclub.
Though many names have been changed, for obvious security reasons, Cedric Jimenez’s Novembre is, by contrast, a heavy-artillery just-the-facts-ma’am police procedural detailing the manhunt that followed in the next five days.The Cannes out-of-competition film starts in a quite surprisingly low-key way, following a woman jogging the banks of the Seine as David Bowie’s mournful early 1970s cover “Sorrow” plays.
The events of the night play out on screen, and though, quite rightly, we are not shown any of the carnage, we do find out that the jogger, Ines (Anaïs Demoustier), is an off-duty cop with the city’s anti-terrorist team, and her shock when she gets a call from the team is a neat way of showing just how bad news really travels.
In the office, Fred (Jean Dujardin) and Héloise (Sandrine Kiberlain) are charged with the impossible task of finding the people responsible for the shootings, using CCTV footage, in-person surveillance and phone wires to investigate a terror network with links to Brussels.
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