We, the orchestra: a virtuoso documentary (review)

A regular at performance halls, Philippe Béziat has managed to infiltrate as close as possible to the Orchester de Paris. The result is a film thundering with originality coupled with an ode to music.

To tell the story of the Paris Orchestra, Philippe Béziat reinvests the codes of silent film. It’s a shame but above all… a masterstroke. Six years after the marvelous Indes Galantes, the music-loving documentary filmmaker is interested in the waltz of winds, strings and percussion which every day fills the futuristic sinuosities of the aluminized colossus of La Villette, in this ensemble of one hundred and twenty musicians led by the Finnish Klaus Mäkelä since 2021.

An English horn, a violin, a trumpet. Here and there, a face, but never a name. The identity of the musicians, recognized by the camera, is erased by their instrument; their testimonies – the paternal absence which marked one, the Armenian origins of another – can be read in the intertitles. For once, in cinema, music wins, uncontested. The voices are only heard when they evoke the extracts that we see their owners listening to. See listen… pretty image, which perfectly represents the sensory machinations, the deliberately destabilizing and wonderfully exhilarating paradox that Béziat enjoys.

We the Orchestra is a film of contrasts. Dedicated to the collective, to “this desire to play together”, as much as to individual trajectories. Advocating the framework as much as a falsely anarchic freedom. Playing on the macroscopic – and the camera twirls along the heights of the Pierre Boulez room – as much as on the detail. A sheet of music is turned, a criterium slides across the paper, a reed is changed, a mouthpiece cleaned. So many well-oiled cogs of this gigantic music box, dissected in such a virtuoso way that it suggests that this film presents not one, but two maestros: one in front of the camera, the other behind.

By Philippe Béziat. Duration: 1h30. Released April 22, 2026