Is there a narrator in the house? La Comédie Française ou L'Amour Joue directed by Frederick Wiseman By GARY KAMIYA would somebody please tell Frederick Wiseman that a narrator is not a tool of Satan? Throughout his career, whether making films about insane asylums ("Titicut Follies," his most famous work), high schools or ballet companies, the documentarian has refused to allow any directorial commentary, preferring the spare, almost ascetic technique of simply letting the camera roll. This approach captures a certain quality of unmediated experience (although it is doubtful whether it is any more "real" than any other technique), but it isn't suited to every subject. When one is dealing with stark, viscerally gripping realities, a flat, cinéma verité approach can be enormously powerful. But some subjects are too complex, multi-faceted -- and inherently undramatic -- to emerge as compelling stories without some help from the artist, some shaping authorial intelligence. This is emphatically the case with Wiseman's sprawling, ambitious new film, "La Comédie Française." There are some interesting things embedded within "Comédie's" three hours and 40 minutes, but viewers who are not frantically interested in either the minutiae of actors rehearsing or the dramaturgy of Marivaux may feel a bit like they are watching Molière's wig grow. Yes, narration can be pat, simplistic and distorting, but it doesn't have to be. And compared to this slow-moving, eddying, tangential film, even the most hackneyed commercial documentary starts seeming attractive. There's a derogatory journalistic expression, "he emptied his notebook," which refers to a reporter who is too lazy or inept to form his notes into an actual story. Wiseman is neither lazy nor inept, but the effect is the same: The viewer has to do way too much of the work of compression and selection. Perhaps the biggest failure of Wiseman's film is, in fact, journalistic: He never asks any hard questions. This isn't surprising: When you rule out narration and voiceover, it's difficult to ask even easy questions. The Comédie Française is France's great cultural museum, a 300-year- old institution charged with both preserving the tradition of Moliere and Racine and making that tradition new. We learn some of this background, obliquely, as the camera watches actors working on four different plays, stagehands moving sets into place and assorted administrative meetings -- but we are not privy to anything particularly gripping or substantive. And we never learn anything about the Comédie's place in contemporary French society -- what, for example, the average worker or student thinks about it. Wiseman captures the elegance and intellectual style of the theater's directors, and the high artistic quality of the company, but he completely fails to examine larger cultural issues. Indeed, his technique makes this almost impossible. Is the Comédie just a repository for fossilized French pride, or is it a dynamic part of French culture? What do other theater companies think about it? What are the plusses and minuses of the fact that Comédie actors are elected for life? One waits in vain for answers to any of these questions: As a result, "La Comédie Française" feels soft, merely celebratory. Of course, we're not dealing here with high crimes. There is much to celebrate about this extraordinary institution, and Wiseman captures much of it. His portrayal of the craft of acting, in particular, is exceptional. His directorial patience pays off as we watch roles being discussed (with formidable sophistication), developed in rehearsal and finally presented onstage. In general, the film gets better as it goes along, if only because after the first hour you begin to get used to the meandering of Wiseman's method. And there is one really lovely and touching scene, in which a former Comédie actress is honored on her hundredth birthday by the company's current doyenne. But the constant jumping from play to play breaks up the dramatic tension, and the thematic parallels that Wiseman is clearly interested in (the role of hypocrisy in love and life, the relation of performance to sincerity, the cultural centrality of Paris) are too vague and disembodied to ever become much more than tantalizing hints. In the end, the film's tone veers uneasily between a slightly stale avant-garde randomness and a simplistic, Sunday-magazine color-feature quality (the shots of seamstresses, Paris streets, etc., seem painfully clichéd). The high IQ dolloped over everything gives it the unimpeachable feeling of a PBS product, but it doesn't make the going any more lively. "La Comédie Française" is too smart to be bad, and if you're willing to put up with its tortoise-like pace you'll learn something and even be charmed. But mostly, it leaves you wishing it had been made by a director willing to stick his nose -- and his mouth -- a little more in other people's business. "La Comédie Française" debuts Sunday, September 1 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings).