Alice Diop’s observational documentary is a beautiful, loose-limned portrait of Paris’s suburbs.
Alice Diop’s documentary “We,” a beautiful, loose-limned portrait of Paris’s “banlieues” or suburbs, brought to my mind the words of the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. When asked if his films are understood in Europe, he replied, “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts.”
That same decolonial spirit animates “We.” Diop, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, grew up in the banlieues among other working-class Black and Arab immigrants. Her film traces an idiosyncratic route along the RER B commuter rail line, the artery that connects the communities on the outskirts of Paris to the heart of the metropolis.
But Diop challenges the notion of a center altogether. Her cartography of her city begins with herself: The “I” opens into the “we.”
Early in the film, Diop observes as commuters board the train at a station in Seine-Saint-Denis in the light of dawn. Peering through a glass window flickering with reflections, her camera settles on the face of an older Black woman, only partly visible behind a seat. As if following the logic of a train, that great equalizer of things near and far, “We” makes seamless connections between disparate images. The passenger sparks Diop’s memories of her mother, who died 25 years ago. Diop’s voice-over guides us through smudgy, decades-old home videos that she scans for traces of her mother, who only appears fleetingly, at the edges. “I start thinking about all the things that weren’t filmed, recorded, archived,” Diop says wistfully.
An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of “We.” Necessarily arbitrary and selective, Diop’s cinematic tour — which includes a long moment with a mechanic as he calls his mother in Mali; visits with the aging patients of Diop’s sister, a nurse; a solemn service at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, where generations of French kings are entombed — points to the impossibility of portraiture itself, whether of a life, a people or a nation. The first-person plural is always a subjective construction, but its elasticity, Diop suggests, can be as liberating as it can be exclusionary.
We (Nous)
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
