The first line in the New York Times review of this movie is: "A movie doesn't have to be busy to be bold." When first reading this opening sentence, I mistook "bold" for "hold" and instantly thought the critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, had written exactly what I thought about Ne Change Rien: This film proves that one does not have to be busy to "hold your attention." But the critic wrote "bold," and I read "hold," which means I was reading not him, but my own impression of this simply gorgeous documentary.

The doc is about the musical life of a famous French actress, Jeanne Balibar. She has been in many films (among them Who Knows, Code 46, Clean, The Duchess of Langeais, and Late August, Early September), and her father is the famous and brilliant philosopher Étienne Balibar (at the age of 27, he co-authored Reading Capital with the legendary French Marxist and structuralist Louis Althusser). In the documentary, we see Jeanne practicing music, recording music, and performing music. The music is sometimes jazzy, sometimes rocky, sometimes triphoppy, and includes a light opera by Offenbach.

Nothing much happens in Ne Change Rien, but we never lose interest in the images on the screen. We powerfully feel these black-and-white moments of Jeanne Balibar smoking and singing. The director, Pedro Costa, doesn't move the camera all about the place or resort to fancy editing to hold our attention. He simply finds the best position for the moment (practicing at home, recording in a studio, performing on a stage) and leaves the camera there. Seriously, filmmakers could learn a lot from this approach: The position of the camera can be the king of a movie. Northwest Film Forum, Oct 28–Nov 3.