“On the facts, on the structure of the investigation, we try to be very precise and we do not go beyond. […] We don’t allow ourselves largesse, even if sometimes we could say to ourselves: ‘It would be better if it happened like that’. No, we stick to the facts. It’s a bit of a job for good soldiers.” On the 8 p.m. set of TF1 in October 2022, Cédric Jimenez (Bac Nord, La French) returned to his film. Sunday November 3, 2024 at 9:10 p.m., France 2 diffuse November with Jean Dujardin, Anaïs Demoustier and Sandrine Kiberlain. The feature film returns to the attacks of November 13, 2015. A bit like See Paris againthe film treats the subject with a certain modesty, without ever showing the main scenes of the drama. A completely accepted script choice on the part of the director, who preferred to focus on the work carried out by the anti-terrorist brigade on the sidelines of the events.
“It’s a choice of staging, a narrative choice, a bias”
“I would have found it obscene, truly obscene… If I had read the slightest effect in this sense, I would never have made the film”explains Cédric Jimenez in the press kit of November. The director grafted himself onto a script already written in part by Olivier Demangel and co-producer Mathias Rubin. “What I liked was that it was the opposite point of view. We didn’t depict the attacks, nor the victims. The only moment where the film does it is in the hospital, but it’s only from the perspective of the investigation and it’s part of the framework, trying to be as modest as possible.he adds. A limit without which the director would not have agreed to join the crew, especially since what he wanted to transcribe on screen was another facet of the drama. “I wanted to recreate what the members of the anti-terrorist brigade had told me. […] It’s a choice of staging, a narrative choice, a bias. The bias was the investigation. The characters are there, they exist, but always at the service of the investigation”he testifies.
Why was Sandrine Kiberlain afraid of playing in November ?
Asked by Europe 1 on October 4, 2022, Jean Dujardin, who plays the role of Fred, wanted to defend the film against its detractors. “The idea is to actually talk about this very painful period, to respect it, to look at it but, but also to talk about an incredible collective. […] Because if there wasn’t this collective, it would be chaos.”. A statement that echoes the one he made on the airwaves of RTL a week earlier: “There are bad things that can be done to you for a film. We’re not making a business out of it, stop taking us for idiots. There are people who worked hard for this. And I can tell you that the film is actually about something else, something rather positive”. Less incisive, Sandrine Kiberlain, who lends her features to Héloïse, admits to having also been doubtful at the beginning. “I was a little scared, I admit, when Cédric told me about the project,” she confided to France TV. “I was afraid that we would tackle this tragic event engraved in us and that it would be reductive to treat it in the cinema, in one way or another. But very quickly, I was taken by the point of view of Cédric Jimenez.” The spectators too, if we rely on its success in theaters.
