Blind date Greg Harris’s November is worth remembering BY PETER KEOUGH
	NOVEMBER Directed by Greg Harrison | Written by Benjamin Brand | With Courteney Cox + James Le Gros + Michael Ealy + Nora Dunn + Nick Offerman + Anne Archer | A Sony Pictures Classics release | 73 minutes BOSTON COMMON + FENWAY + KENDALL SQUARE + CIRCLE/CHESTNUT HILL + SUBURBS

Film offers the ideal medium for mirroring mental processes, an activity that’s guaranteed to alienate anyone looking for entertainment. Greg Harrison’s second film (like his first, Groove, it was a favorite at Sundance) tries to have it both ways. November intends to demonstrate how truth lurks in the spaces outside the frame and between each cut, how editing and composition reflect the psychology of discovery and repression. But this is just what someone paying $10 to be diverted is trying to forget. So Harrison compromises, welding his formalist exercise to the more accessible structure of The Sixth Sense, Groundhog Day and Memento. The flawed result underscores the potential of film and the limits of commercial filmmaking.

Maybe his first concession to popular taste is casting Friends alumna Courteney Cox as Sophie. Sporting an unflattering haircut (an " underachiever’s, " mom Anne Archer tells her, in one of the few instances of character development), shapeless clothes, and no make-up to soften her hard edges, she does efface memories of Monica. En route home after dinner with her boyfriend, Hugh (James Le Gros), she asks him to stop at a convenience store to buy her some chocolate. Anyone who watches movies knows that an unscheduled stop at a convenience store means ironic disaster. Here the inevitable trigger-happy robber pops in and Hugh ends up dead on the floor.

Or does he? Traumatized, Sophie checks in with a psychiatrist, where she confesses that she had been cheating on Hugh just prior to his death. In the photography class she teaches, a slide in a student’s presentation shows the convenience store around the time of the crime. Sophie notifies the police and does some investigating of her own, taking a lead from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and expanding the image in her darkroom. (References to the existentially distraught protagonists in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant and Francis Coppola’s The Conversation follow, more distracting advertisements of the filmmaker’s cleverness). Throw in the unsettling digital photography and the jangling, pixilated computer interludes — blood, broken glass, other abrupt, suggestive images — by Lew Baldwin separating the film’s three sections and it’s clear that something more — or less — is going on than meets the eye.

Sophie, you realize, is inventing stories to avoid a devastating revelation. Although Harrison hasn’t created enough of a character to allow you to form a strong emotional bond with her, the film’s imagery, editing, and disorienting rhythms draw you into Sophie’s distress and at the same time alert you to how her struggle parallels the form of the film itself. But Harrison can’t resist exploiting our desire to uncover what Sophie is trying to hide. He stirs the generic expectation of resolution, and he more or less fulfills it, but at the cost of subverting November’s ambiguity.

His biggest miscalculation might be his labeling of each section with a stage from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s pop psychology text On Death and Dying. That assuaging of our terror at the inescapable and the unknowable almost kills off what is terrifying and unknowable about the film. November is the cruelest kind of movie, promising brilliance and originality and then backtracking with the standard excuse that these are things no one wants to see.