A documentary on "Le Monde", a veritable institution in France? Pretty good idea.
You'll learn how this highly-respected newspaper works, how it's made, who are people who write for it, the people who read it.
The disappointment is immediate. Your wish "Everything you wanted to know about le Monde" will definitely not be granted. Just lower your expectations!
First, you'll get no introduction, nothing to put in perspective. Instead, you'll get thrust out of the blue into the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair (which did cause quite a stir in France at the time, but does it speak to a younger viewer or to a foreign viewer?).
In terms of contextualization, you'll have to be content with an extract from the TV news and try to understand pair of journalists talking amongst themselves.
It'll take you a while before you understand what Yves Jeuland, the director, is actually getting at: the 2012 presidential campaign (and hardly anything else), when Socialist candidate François Hollande substituted himself for Strauss-Kahn following the latter's sexual misconduct in New York.
In fact, there will be no overview of the newspaper, everything will revolve around following and interviewing the candidate and commenting on his every move (at times, it is true, very critically). The question that arises then is why the title "Les gens du Monde" (The people of "Le Monde", "Le Monde" meaning "The World"...)? A little misleading, I'm afraid. A wider scope was expected: the promise is not kept.
Aware now that there will be no other subject than the French election campaign and its blah blah blah you'll have to make do. With a few good moments all the same: some spicy exchanges on the future president and most interesting of all, the debate on whether the rather progressive newspaper should openly support the left-wing candidate or remain neutral. As not everyone agrees on the subject, the verbal exchanges are rather juicy, as is thought-provoking the debate on survival of the paper press in the age of the Internet and the social networks.
But the whole thing remains globally unsatisfactory. "Les gens du Monde" too often gives the impression of having been filmed at random, without any strong ideas or any sense of pedagogy, and assembled haphazardly. Which unfortunately makes it hard for the viewer to get hooked.
