Louis Malle was always something of an outsider, never quite in synch with cinematic trends. Place de la République, made with Fernand Mozskowicz, seems a response to the great French cinéma vérité works such as Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer and Chris Marker's Le joli mai. In each, the filmmakers established a method of approaching strangers on the street and asking them a provocative question. The interaction between the filmmaker and filmed subject is of utmost importance; Malle picks up this style for Place de la République, alternating on-camera interviews with sequences involving hidden camera and microphones. The result is a fascinating portrait of then- contemporary France, a film that clearly draws from the experience of his Indian films while looking ahead to Malle's American documentaries of the mid-1980s.