Citizen Nobel review – sweet and impassioned portrait of a stereotype-defying scientist

For a documentary about a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, you might fairly assume that Citizen Nobel would be a dry and intellectually rigorous study of a scientist and his craft, but that is only a small part of what Stephane Goel’s film is really about. Correctly assuming that the actual science of the achievement – involving some sort of cryo-technology to make better microscope lenses – will be mostly inscrutable to an audience, Goel instead focuses on the man behind the science, charming Swiss biophysicist Jacques Dubochet.

After winning the Prize – and all the money and international attention that comes with it – in 2017, 75-year-old Dubochet was not struck by a sense of fulfilment, instead immediately questioning his legacy and the world that he and his generation was leaving behind. Goel follows Dubochet on his new path as a climate crusader, speaking alongside Greta Thunberg at conferences and passionately berating his lax-about-climate generational peers.

It makes for a pretty slight documentary (unless you’re really into microscope lenses, there’s not much in the way of revelations here), but Dubochet is great company, defying stereotypes of his Old White Male-ness at every opportunity. Pushing for more women in STEM and teaching science to migrant kids at his local social centre – all while petitioning his hometown of Morges to take action on the shrinking of the nearby glaciers – he’s a scientist who sees the key to the future not in a great technological leap but in human effort and togetherness.

It’s a worldview that is fun to be around for Citizen Nobel’s sub-90 minute runtime, which zips by breezily enough even if Goel’s lack of formal ambition does make a lot of the scenes quite samey. It would be easy for any of us to rest on our laurels after winning the highest possible honour in our chosen field, but Dubochet is here to remind us that that status comes with a duty and that it’s only in taking on this duty that a life’s work can really be complete. It’s a sweet and impassioned portrait of an unfussily remarkable man.

Citizen Nobel is released on True Story on December 19.