November is a low budget digital film directed by Greg Harrison, who wrote and directed the minor indie hit Groove back in 2000. It stars Courtney Cox, whose previous film work has never come close to eclipsing her status as a cast member of Friends. The film, in other words, is without the highest precedent. Hence, I did not expect to see such an eloquently fragile performance from Cox; nor to have my expectations so consistently be eluded by a narrative that refused to be pinned down by the cliches it openly courted; nor to find myself thinking about the film long after it had ended to the extent that I did. November is a lovely little surprise. Certainly, there have been films of greater substance and supposed importance that did not interest me after the fact nearly as much as this one; I think I can attribute this partially to the fact that I was surprised by it, but also to the almost subconscious precision that it seems to have been executed with.

There's a quote from the film that has rather obvious, almost gimmicky metaphoric qualities:regarding photography and composition, Cox's character, a photography teacher named Sophie, says that "what's outside the frame is just as important as what's in it." This does indeed apply to the whole film, as one might expect, and I could explain November via that metaphor in one or two sentences; but at the same time, that wouldn't really do justice to the quality of ambiguity Harrison and screenwriter Benjamin Brand manage to achieve here; there are subtle structural games at play that deserve further consideration. This is a film in which things are not what they seem, but not really in the way in which that idiom is normally applied.

Thinking about the narrative structure, I recalled the Greek philosopher Zeno's most famous paradoxes of motion: particularly, his Dichotic Paradox and his Arrow Paradox, which suggest that objects in motion can never actually move. Aside from the fact that the Arrow Paradox is wonderfully representative of the 24-frames-per-second illusion upon which the entire medium of cinema is based, these two theories seem applicable to November because it is a film that takes place in the a single moment and a single place. Harrison and Brand explore the potential spatial and temporal paths that occur after this moment, and takes note of the infinite and variable subdivisions that could occur within it, but are never actually able to leave it. From one perspective, this leaves the film with a very limited scope; at the same time, that limitation contains fascinating possibilities and paradoxes of its own, and the film is masterful in its exploration of them.

The moment in question occurs at a corner store in Los Angeles on the night of November 6th. Sophie is waiting in the car for her boyfriend Hugh (James LeGros) to pick up some chocolate ice cream. She hears a gunshot and rushes inside, and then the film cuts to some weeks later and it is revealed that Hugh was shot and killed in a robbery. Sophie is seeing a psychiatrist to deal with the loss, which is compounded by a sense of guilt she can't explain. Her mother is concerned about how she won't remove Hugh's voice from her answering machine. And in class, one of her students' slide presentations curiously includes a photo of Sophie's car outside the corner store. She studies it under a magnifying glass. Is that her inside the car? And is the blurry figure barely visible through the store window Hugh, moments before his death?

There are clear traces of Antonioni as Sophie searches the photograph for a clue that may or may not be there; we remember Blowup and think we have a finger on the film. But then there's an eerie scene with a television and an open door that seems drawn from various supernaturally oriented horror films. And then that segues into a touch of Bergman, as Sophie has a psychotic meltdown that is represented on film in a rather terrifying barrage of visual abstractions reminiscent of the similar schismatic point in Persona. And then the film starts over again, on November 6th, as Hugh disappears into the store to buy the ice cream - but before we can nod and think of Run Lola Run, it's becoming apparent that November, as derivative as it may be, may actually be more than the sum of its cinematic references.

The film will return to this scene outside the corner store - the very one seemingly captured in Sophie's mysterious photograph - one more time, but it should be noted that this is not that paradoxical central moment, the one from which the rest of the film is extrapolated. I wish to describe that moment, which is key to why the film works so well. To do so, I'll have to divulge certain secrets, so I'd suggest waiting until after you've viewed the film to continue reading. And indeed, I do recommend viewing it.

Each segment in the film, each of the three variations, is given a title: 'Grief,' 'Denial,' 'Acceptance.' These titles might seem trite, but there's an unexpected ambiguity to them. One can initially assume that these refer to Sophie's attempts to cope with Hugh's death. In fact, they refer to her own. The moment in time that the entire film occupies, revealed at the very end, is one in which Sophie dies, a victim of the same corner store robbery that took Hugh's life. In the moment of her death, Sophie projects, she reflects, she looks for a way out, but she does not exceed That Moment. To say that her life flashes before her eyes, and ours, is tempting but incorrect: through these imploding flights of imagination, Sophie is attempting to deal with something very specific, even as her physical state renders that specific in abstract emotional terms.

That she dies at all is not misleading or arbitrary; and although it may be unexpected, it is not shocking or even surprising. There is no sense that the filmmakers have pulled the rug out from under the audience for the sake of a visceral thrill. Rather, there is a deep and simple satisfaction to be found in seeing the subconscious groundwork laid by Harrison and Brand come to such perfect fruition. Watching the film a second time is almost more rewarding than the initial viewing, which is all about trying to solve a mystery that doesn't need solving. In retrospect, it is evident that this is the only outcome the film could reach.

One of the things I admired most about the film was the solidity - the backwards compatibility - of its structure; there are no false steps, no wild cards to throw the credibility into flux. When a film trades on an audience's confusion, it's easy for filmmakers to get away with throwing in random elements to make their job easier. I'm talking, for example, about characters or situations which have no root in the narrative, whose presence in retrospect is entirely arbitrary and included for a specific purpose, such as exposition. Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, which also was about a dying man's final thoughts, undid itself by wildly exceeding the perspective of its conceit. Here, that same conceit is consistently upholstered on a scene by scene basis, even when the narrative delves into events that may never have happened; characters (the Asian student, for example, or the kind police officer) and scenarios (the elevator that doesn't work, the fancy restaurant) are pieces of memory, rather than figments of imagination; ample evidence is given of their roots in Sophie's mind. They are the unchanging factors in the varying tangents of the screenplay.

The factors that are not constant, appropriately, are the more abstract elements of the film: its aesthetics, which include the prominent use of literally abstract imagery to visually represent Sophie's state of mind. These sequences, directed by experimental filmmaker Lew Baldwin, occur most forcefully in the first segment, 'Grief.' They at first seem to be merely tricks of Harrison's occasionally nervous editing style - akin to Darren Arronofsky's hip-hop montages in Requiem For A Dream - but at a certain point they bloom into frighteningly percussive, primal bursts of imagery. There is also the miniDV cinematography by Nancy Schrieber, which frequently avoids the digital standard of prevailing close-ups in favor of wide shots; there are some truly beautiful shots, such as the repeated motif of Sophie approaching an elevator, or her standing against the pure white light of an empty transparency projector, that despite their scope do not suffer from the format's limited resolution.

The film was produced under the InDiGent label, which enforces a no frills digital production for its films. This isn't a story that required the immediate aesthetics offered by the miniDV format, but where those aesthetics pay off is in the transfer to 35mm film. The digital image becomes a chemical one, and whatever information is lost in the process creates a rich, decaying image that is entirely different from what one might expect from either format. For most miniDV films, the 35mm transfer is simply a vehicle for exhibition; here, it seems a deliberate addition to the film's style.

The aesthetics of the film have a clear delineation; when That Moment is finally revealed, it is under flat, uncinematic lighting intended to heighten its reality. This progression may seem at odds with the film's narrative structure, which by design must initially be perceived as radically nonlinear in structure; but I think there are more interesting ways to look at it. Most narratives travel from point A to point B. Others are cyclical, returning to their starting place. Still others, those that involve flashbacks or are simply broken up for various reasons, start and stop at various points on a cyclical or linear narrative. And then there's this story, which could fit into either of the two latter models, but is so precisely subjective that it could also be perceived as never actually making it past Point A. It's a puzzle that has put itself together; an arrow that's forever at rest.

November is, at 76 minutes, quite brief, and is what might be considered a 'small' picture, given the limits of its budget and scope. Chances are, the consideration I've given it will be taken for granted by many audience members, who will be pleased by the experience and perhaps favorably liken the film to other indie thrillers like Memento, and critics may malign it for revolving around a perceived twist. Both reactions are valid, but I've chosen to look further than that because I there is something exemplary at work here, a limited but complete sense of perfection; and perfection, no matter how minimal the scale, is always worth discussing.