November: An Award Winning Indie Film

November is almost a literary example of how a movie should work. The film operates by illustrating what is within the frame is planned and that what is withheld in normal or unexpected experience is by intent withheld. The viewer must deconstruct why this had been done and for what effect.

Courtney Cox plays a woman who wears shapeless clothing and stark glasses and transits the empty corridors and many gateways of her life with a suspiciously convenient set of crutches. Her every consciousness is overladen with hints and surmises about how she is mentally shielded from reality and the cost of living this way.

November is ostensibly about a photography instructor played by Courtney Cox. She lives in a very narrowly intersected world populated by people who may exist inside her own head. Different revisitations of her experience show to an equally watchful audience what we should be focusing on.

November is the time frame all the events in the film occur in. But we see multiple tries at making sense of the same November. The reference scene titles show that while the audience knows they are reliving the same finite and unique time frame, elements and dynamics within the occurrences shown vary.

November is a movie that is enjoyable if you have seen its cinematic precursors or not. Everything from the Twilight Zone to the Others to memento to Star Trek should have some vague resonances. The thumping noises, the sideways photographs, the blurry and distorted images, we all know where this is going.

Tear down the wallpaper of any character and you'll have four walls of conflict boxed at right angles. But this character has surprisingly empty rooms and needs people in her life for color and flavor. They are her "furniture". Her discovery of tears in her world and rips in her environment take on psychological significance.