A few months after the trial of the November 13 attacks, French cinema seized on this highly flammable subject. After the modesty of Alice Winocour in Revoir Paris, place to the nervous tension of Cédric Jimenez for November. As usual, the filmmaker ignores all emotion and subtlety in the service of an absolute: efficiency.
November: a tense thriller, but depoliticized to the extreme
Since the turmoil caused by Bac Nord, Cédric Jimenez is like a tightrope walker on his line. Tossed around according to the controversies, the filmmaker continues his path on a winding path, dedicating his art to the sacrosanct tension of the nervous thriller, a subgenre that has elevated him to the rank of director now awaited. With November, a film about the Paris attacks of autumn 2015, we can recognize the hothead character of Jimenez, not really afraid of what seems to be the most delicate social subject in France for many years. In this thriller without any real main protagonist, the viewer immerses himself in the anti-terrorist brigade that tracked down the terrorists of November 13, until the confrontation with Abdelhamid Abaaoud in an apartment in Saint-Denis, five days later. A fantasized and tense dive into a moment when the heart of Paris and France has stopped beating. 
All the ingredients of Cédric Jimenez's cinema are present. From the overarchetypal nature of the protagonists, to the formidable efficiency of the staging, the spectator who has not missed La French or Bac Nord will not be in unfamiliar territory. However, the latter is undermined. It is impossible for the filmmaker to approach the issue of Islamist attacks too head-on, not daring to show images of terrorists in full act, or even images of damage, victims, suffering. Through nervousness, his paradigmatic obsession as a director, Jimenez is only interested in the fluidity of the story, evading both sensitive testimonies and the most subversive situations.
Hide this humanity I cannot see
This question from the distanced point of view, which will be qualified as appropriate by most, especially by the victims themselves (moreover not really solicited upstream, nor shown in the work), raises many questions, both ethical and artistic. Should we already deal with the question of November 13 in cinema? So how? In the dark rooms, two visions are confronting each other at this moment. The humanist and modest one of Alice Winocour in Revoir Paris, dealing with the trauma of a woman (Virginie Efira) and a man (Benoit Magimel) victims of the attack on the terraces, and the quasi-clinical one of Cédric Jimenez. Unlike its female counterpart, the Marseille director plays the card of complete dehumanization. Because little or nothing characterizes the characters of this story, comparable to puppets whose threads seem to be controlled by the forces of fate. A strong (or lazy) choice, reflecting the obligation to erase the rescue and investigation services, propelled symbolic "heroes" of the story, caught in an infernal whirlwind that they never thought they would have to face. But it is also a handicap for history, nothing really attaching us to its figures and intrinsically, to this history, except by its brutality.
Committed actors
If questioning the morality of the work is no more relevant than the choice of the director itself, the problem of impact is obvious. Because to want to depoliticize such a hot subject to such an extent, to dispossess the bodies of their souls, the shock that November should cause is greatly diminished. So much so that in his complacent rectitude, Jimenez plays with our nerves with artifices of editing, sound mixing favoring the immersive character. 
Without ever asking even the slightest social question to its viewer, he levels his new film, certainly of good quality, to a gruff entertainment quite captivating. This is the most disturbing posture of his cinema, because by absolving himself of any political commitment, Cédric Jimenez distills a disturbing ambiguity that makes one uncomfortable. And this, despite all the qualities inherent in his style. Because November remains, like Bac Nord last year, a roller coaster where heart palpitations are felt more than once. Thanks to a rather remarkable art of sequencing, the filmmaker proves from film to film his ability to build memorable passages by their technicality. It is clear that this famous design of efficiency, so praised by Jimenez, is once again accomplished. Nervous from start to finish, Novembre also benefits from committed actors, Jean Dujardin and Anaïs Demoustier in the lead, and a feeling of magnitude quite commendable, especially in a French cinema sometimes relet go of the cavalry. A real entertainment therefore, by a talented formalist. Is it enough of petaradant effects and a frenzied rhythm to shock? It is on this rhetorical question that leaves us stunned November, which, by striving to touch on its complex subject, abandons any dramatic and political ambition. Between characters whose horror we know nothing about and a context whose horror we do not grasp, it is difficult to even envisage a cathartic look at one of the darkest pages of the France of the twenty-first century. The great film that would help heal the gaping wounds will wait.
