A French documentary sets immigrant life against the West.
Richard Pryor’s old Tonto versus the Lone Ranger punchline — “What do you mean ‘We,’ white man?” — is snappier than the race-power dynamics presented in We (Nous), the anti-colonial feature by French documentarian Alice Diop.
The Paris-born child of Senegalese parents who emigrated to Europe during the 1960s, Diop surveys the discontent aliens feel about their status as French citizens. Her bland approach, casually observing the different habits between white, black, and Arab Parisians, falls just short of the divisiveness that our wrecking-ball media and politicians indulge. Yet We (Nous) conveys divisiveness nonetheless.
Diop’s premise starts with white elites hunting stags in Fontainebleau, viewing their quarry through binoculars; then she shifts to already defeated African immigrants in Paris. “They’re mean to us, when we only come here to work,” says auto-mechanic Ismael, who can’t get the “anti-start indicator” to function on an old heap. He’s as clueless as Diop about the sociology and economics of imported labor.
When it looks like Diop might be somewhat ambivalent about her colonial heritage — perhaps advocating against mass immigration — We (Nous) resorts to the expected diatribe about the exploited, underserved, and underprivileged.
Rather than directly contrasting French snobbery with African and Muslim disdain, or distinguishing overt racism from the cultural differences arising from Europe’s immigration crisis, Diop stumbles onto replacement-theory complexities. Her transitions from social observation to personal revelations (family home videos and her sister’s social work) sentimentalize exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie.
Like a second-generation offspring who takes her advantages for granted, Diop criticizes her parents’ adopted home, disregarding their dreams and sacrifices as immigrants seeking better opportunities. Viewing France through social-justice skepticism, she conflates ethnic resentment with the ironies of assimilation. Family warmth is unfairly weighed against nationalist customs, such as middle-aged whites touring the Basilica of St. Denis to commemorate Louis XVI.
As a filmmaker, Diop follows the traditions of Jean Rouch and Ousmane Sembene, but she neglects their ethnographic examinations of diaspora. She photographs the faces of blacks at a train station for their anonymity rather than the universality of preoccupied workers — not bothering to respect the difference but convinced that all inherited a social system dominated by inequality.
Diop uses the first-person plural address “we” disingenuously. Neither her politicized grammar nor her filmmaking is as clever as Michel Gondry’s The We and the I (2013), which fondly depicted the everyday crises of multiracial urban American adolescents. Diop’s “we” is a means of shaming a nation’s inherent segregation, its “abominable legacy” as one reviewer put it.
There’s a quintessential conversation between Diop and writer Pierre Bergounioux, contrasting a young black woman to an elderly white male, filmmaker to author. Diop states their shared desire “to conserve the existence of ordinary lives that would have disappeared.” But this is another progressive fallacy. The plight of colonial immigrants is a common European theme for various artists, high (André Téchiné, Pedro Costa) and low (Gianfranco Rosi). Cinema may be too sophisticated a medium for Diop’s prejudiced survey of France’s plurality; it records more than she can assess.
Diop’s modern France comes off as the cunning vision of a community-based avenger claiming human rights just like a Marxist New York City pol (no doubt France grows them, too). Her work was featured among other examples of the West’s turning against itself in a recent documentary series at Lincoln Center titled “The Art of the Real.” The series included Diop’s exploration of immigrant machismo, Towards Tenderness, which made the expected feminist points without ethnological rigor. She is admired for her race-gender tokenism, as was the French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop (no relation) in 2020, but a documentarian needs to make her case through facts rather than personal “truth.”
We (Nous) typifies contemporary culture’s seething political churn — that post-Obama sedition evident throughout our culture in which celebrities announce their disapproval by taking a knee during the National Anthem, complain to Oprah about being disrespected, or make anti-nationalist movies like this. Diop needs more than shallow social impressions to enlist us in her cynicism, especially when she doesn’t command Richard Pryor’s pitiless wit.
