Over a period of some ten days in 1972, Malle and fellow cameraman François Mozskowicz observed and talked to people in Paris's populous Place de la République, sometimes using concealed cameras and microphones, but often with the cameraman and sound recordist in full view. It's a film full of the kind of surprises people-the filmmakers and their subjects-can bring to a work when they are relaxed, engaged, and open to anything. You can learn a lot about Parisians in their neighborhoods, about 1972, about Malle as a young man; also about language, as Ying Ying Wu wrote in Film Buff: “Malle…makes a comment on the confusion of language by focusing on the way people talk and not what they say.”