Alice Diop’s calm and subtle documentary is very loosely and freewheelingly structured around people and communities that she has found along the RER rail line in Paris: Diop acknowledges the inspiration of author and publisher François Maspero and his 1990 book Les Passagers du Roissy Express. But it is also more obviously structured around her memories of her parents, incomers from Senegal: she has interviews with her dad which she committed to videotape but is still deeply regretful that she has only the briefest footage of her mum.
Diop meditates on the diversity and difference in the French people: interestingly, in one scene, she shows some people sunbathing and listening to Edith Piaf’s song La Foule (The Crowd), and the lines about the lovers pushed together: “Écrasés l’un contre l’autre, nous ne formons qu’un seul corps / Et le flot sans effort nous pousse, enchaînes l’un et l’autre …” (Crushed against each other, we are one body / And the effortless flow pushes us, chained together …”) One guy remarks: “Together? No one’s together any more.”
Diop also shows some aristocratic white people preparing to join a hunt and scouting for stags at dawn; she shows us a garage mechanic from Mali who is wary of racists; she shows us her sister, a carer, and has a formal interview with the French author Pierre Bergounioux, who says he wanted to write to give a literary identity to his own neighbourhood in Corrèze in central France, much as Diop says her film-making is driven by the need to bear witness to represent people and communities who might otherwise go unnoticed.
Interspersed with these more foregrounded conversations are ambient scenes of crowds of people just being. It’s a film which needs an investment of attention, but there is a great observational intelligence and sympathy at work.
• We (Nous) is available on 29 June on Mubi.
