Nicolas Philibert is a film-maker with hall-of-fame status for the 2002 documentary Étre et avoir (To Be and To Have), his wonderful study of a primary school, and Nénette (2010), a vision of an ageing orangutan and its heartwrenchingly prison-like existence in a zoo. This latest film, made in 2013, is a pleasant, undemanding, rather Wiseman-lite study of a day in the life of Radio France, with all its producers, announcers, editors and tech people placidly busying themselves about their work.
It’s engaging, but without the power and point of Philibert’s earlier work, and today’s historical perspective means that the film’s blandly untroubled atmosphere feels a bit irrelevant. This is very much a pre-Je Suis Charlie Paris, and the professionals here operate in what must now seem to them an innocent age. The film is chiefly interesting in its emphasis on music, which encourages you also to find a musical polyphony in the talk, a harmony of different voices. A more daring film might even have gone for a more experimental collage of sounds. Well: an interesting study of something similar to our own Radio 4.
