Wir

Very interesting and cutting edge documentary of the Parisian metropolis; portraying a diverse panorama of people. What makes this film special is the sensitivity and empathy it encompasses towards all Parisians living in the metropolis - from children, senior citizens to the upper echelon of French society.

Alice Diop introduces us to individuals or groups who live along the RER B train line in the Paris region. It sounds like an interesting concept, but it's not a subject. She shows us individuals: for example, homeless people, dependent pensioners, short-hunting enthusiasts.

Some are family members. Some are not. Parts document, like the garage mechanic from Mali who lives in a van and repairs in parking lots. Or the nurse who visits the elderly, the section with the most hysteria. She also shows us a motley crew of individuals, including an intellectual and fanatics of the short-hunting protocol.

The whole is disjointed, non-linear in its unfolding and therefore in its message. In the long run, this leads to boredom (almost 2 hours for a documentary is too long). We do understand the personal side of certain subjects, with the evocation of the director's father, and her sister in the home help segment. But boredom sets in. And it's not helped by the many transitional shots of landscapes that punctuate the film's movements. There are also plenty of shots of the city (the Paris suburbs), gardens and woods. These contribute to the atmosphere. But they also contribute to the feeling of duration, but as they don't convey any information on the subject, they bore us.

The film covers a variety of stories, sometimes completely unconnected. There's a careworker visiting her elder clients, there's old footage of people's parents reminiscing about their journeys to Paris, there's an interview with a writer (or rather, a conversation between director and the writer that served as her inspiration), scenes of a hunt, some priests reading some king's last words to an audience in a grand church, part of a film in a local museum about deported Jews, kids in the banlieues rolling down a hill on cardboard. Some scenes are funny, others tender, others (such as the church scene and the hunt scene) so unsympathetic and dull I don't know why the director filmed or included them. While I liked her ambition - I've never seen a film attempt to include so many social locations - it seemed disjointed and overly long and ultimately dragged.

The film is both observational and metaphorical, the observational bits are dull, and the metaphorical bits are obvious. It is meant as some sort of tapestry stitched out of random unconnected stories of people living in the Paris suburbs, and the disconnect is part of the point. But none of these scenes, nor the home video fragments that reflect Diop's upbringing in these same suburbs, makes much of an impression. I don't know why the rich folks at the beginning and at the very end of the film, in which they engage in a foxhunt, allowed Diop to film them as part of her metaphorical statement. If a white filmmaker used a black subculture to make a negative comparison, they would have been accused of perpetuating a colonial gaze and hounded out of filmmaking by the moral watchdogs of the documentary industry. I think filmmakers of any color, gender, or culture should be able to use their talents to tell stories about any and all people, as long as they show empathy and respect and skill.

This doc seems a bit unfocused, following a variety of people living on the edges of the Parisian metropolis. It's difficult to grasp if you don't know a bit about this region, where cultural diversity is obvious but cultural mixing is not. As such, the only thread guiding the film is the commuter train RER B, which we see more or less prominently during each segment as the director follows the train line showing glimpses of locals' lives along it.

I found the film hard to follow as first, even though I come from the place featured (which helps me understand the thread of the RER, for example); the movie almost looks like a anthology film. After thinking about it however, I think it's the point: these people are very different but they barely mix, let alone know each other. Only a few connections exist between them (such as the professor who teached the director, who is herself the sister of another protagonist). Even the geographical connection, as shown by the train running in the background, is tenuous.

It's in this way that the film says a lot about "us", the French people, living as an increasingly divided society. But the connections I mentioned seem to shine a small spotlight of hope that these divides are not inevitable.

So even if the form of the film is weird and it might be hard to get into it (let alone stay interested the whole time), the image that the whole thing conveys and the message I can guess behind it are very interesting and worth a viewing.