Transition to anonymity – Newspaper Kommersant No. 202 (7403) dated 10/31/2022

Cédric Jimenez’s film “The Scars of Paris” (Novembre) was released, about the search for terrorists who committed a series of attacks in the French capital. The director tried to give the picture an almost documentary intonation, however, according to Julia Shagelman, instead of comprehending the tragic events, their rather indifferent fixation appeared on the screen.

The focus of the tape is a few November days, when not only Paris, but the whole world was shocked by terrorist attacks, the largest in terms of the number of victims in the history of France. On November 13, 2015, three suicide bombers blew themselves up near the Stade de France stadium, where at that time a friendly match between the football teams of France and Germany was taking place. At the same time, another group of terrorists shot people on the terraces of several bars and cafes in the 10th and 11th arrondissement, and another blew up a suicide vest in a cafe on Voltaire Boulevard. The third group of attackers staged a massacre in the Bataclan concert hall, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal performed. In total, 130 people died as a result of the attacks, and more than three hundred were injured. The Islamic State (ISIS, a terrorist organization banned in Russia) claimed responsibility for the attacks. On November 18, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, police detained seven suspects, two more died when one of them managed to activate an explosive device. In the five sleepless and nervous days between the two dates, the main events of the picture just fit.

However, it starts not in Paris and not in November, but in Athens ten months before the attacks. Here, the Greek police, together with the French intelligence services, is raiding the apartment where one of the key ISIS militants is hiding. He manages to get away with amazing ease, and Fred (Jean Dujardin), who is in charge of the operation from the French side, is left with nothing. It should be noted that about this brave operative, as, indeed, about other characters, we will not really know anything: neither his position, nor the exact circle of his powers, nor whether he has a family, any interests, in addition to the fight against terrorism, and some personal characteristics, in addition to the readiness to devote oneself to this fight. Obviously, the approach in the spirit of “his name is unknown, his feat is immortal” was deliberately chosen by the director Jimenez and his two co-authors of the script: their heroes are not heroes at all, but the most ordinary, albeit trained, men and women, parts of a single, although, as show plot twists, not a very well-oiled mechanism that opposes evil. It is clear that the audience, by definition, will be on their side, but it is rather difficult to experience any emotions in relation to such impersonal characters.

The fateful evening of November 13 finds Fred and his colleague Eloise on another business trip. At the headquarters of the counter-terrorism department, one employee is on duty – Marco (Jeremy Renier), while the rest are busy with the same things as other Parisians: watching football, drinking in bars, jogging along the embankment. Suddenly, the phone starts ringing, but Marco does not have time to accept the call, when the second ring, the third one rings, and now all the phones are tearing at the same time, signaling that something really terrible has happened. This is one of Jimenez’s most successful decisions – he does not show the attacks themselves, but only the reaction to them, from the speech of the president and the patter of the news to the overturned faces of intelligence officers. But, as with the characters’ personalities, he seems to be afraid to dig deeper, to linger on those reactions, to reflect on them, pushing the film forward instead.

For the next hour and a half, the authors plunge into the investigative routine, transmitted with all possible detail and plausibility. Listening to telephone conversations, checking databases, matching fingerprints, surveillance, rewind, repeat. Every now and then, the forces of good find themselves in a dead end: one thread instead of terrorists leads to drug dealers, the development of the mosque does not bring results, the too enterprising employee Ines (Anais Demoustier), who followed the suspect without informing her superiors, eventually arrests the undercover agent, causing an interdepartmental scandal .

When watching “Scars of Paris” a comparison with Kathryn Bigelow’s “Target One” (2012) suggests itself, with the same meticulousness reproducing ten years of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden. However, there the authors went into deeper (and not the most comfortable) topics, asking, for example, where the boundaries of what is permitted in the fight against evil lie, whether the pursuit of bad guys turns into a pretext for restricting the freedoms of everyone else, what imprint such work leaves on their performers. Jimenez seems to want to touch on these issues too, especially when Samia (Lina Coudry), a Parisian of Arab origin, appears on the screen, ready to lead the special services to the escaped terrorists, to whom Ines has to make obviously impossible promises. But just then, screen time is coming to an end, and the human drama gives way to a spectacular scene of the storming of an apartment in Saint-Denis, and then the standard speeches that the war on terror is just beginning. Alas, the film will not be included in the list of her victories.