We (Nous) film review — bracing documentary asks questions about French unity

Amid the current churn of French politics, We (Nous) arrives as a bracingly intelligent X-ray of the Fifth Republic. In this boldly structured documentary, every moment is there for a reason.

Yet Alice Diop’s film might at first seem loose-fit: a portrait of lives along the RER B commuter train line running out of Paris, focused mostly but not wholly on the working-class north-east suburbs. A car mechanic toils in the early-morning cold; Diop’s nurse sister tends to sprightly elderly patients. Their mother is buried back in Senegal. In voiceover, the director mourns her absence from her family’s only surviving home movie. When we see it, someone has taped over a chunk with the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One.

You might read into such scenes the easy, one-love humanism a title like We could imply. And different aspects of France do happily mingle. Under a flight path, young banlieue-dwellers groove to Édith Piaf. Meeting writer Pierre Bergounioux in a pretty spot on the Yvette river, Diop tells him how his diaries conveyed to her “a life I will never have, but which moves me as if it were my own”.

Yet their conversation also turns to Rousseau and revolution. And other scenes feel purposely left to jar with the rest: fox hunts and tributes to dead royalty at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Every English child first learning French discovers that “nous” means “we”. What either really signifies is the question Diop leaves us with.

★★★★☆

On Mubi in the US and UK now