The documentary is not the most selling genre in the cinema, and when it lasts almost three hours, there's a lot to bet that you gave up the idea of viewing quite quickly. And you'd be wrong! Our body is without a doubt the most beautiful documentary of 2023, and simply one of the most powerful feature films since beautiful lurette! Back on a movie-monument, all soon available on physical media...
From cemetery to hospital
The long and quiet paths of the Lachaise Father, her cross graves and her abandoned mausoleums, this is what the director has to go through every morning Claire Simon to go to his location: the gynaecological service of Tenon Hospital in Paris. In response to the proposal of producer Kristina Larsen, she decided to produce a documentary dealing with the body to the feminine. Then begins a film-epicée through the corridors and multiple alcoves of this health facility, attempting to transcribe as closely as possible the countless facets of femininity.
After The Wood whose dreams are made (2015) exploring the habits of the wood users of Vincennes or even God's Offices (2008) focused on the question of family planning, the famous documentary artist focuses on women's bodies in all their multiplicity. Too young body burdened with unwanted pregnancy, body born in the wrong sex, body passed from one sex to another, body unable to have a child, body eaten by cancer, body bruised by mammectomy, body weakened by old age, Claire Simon pulls out with her camera stories as much captured on the fly in a corridor as at the deepest of the privacy of an operating room to deliver it pudically to us on the screen.
After a brief introduction where the documentary artist is staged at the Varda, she will (almost) completely wipe out for the benefit of the bodies that will scroll in front of the camera. The plans will be long, and will capture as closely as possible the words (in long conversations between patients and doctors) as the movements (skin, hands, palpations, surgical gestures, testimonies of tenderness). Then, in successive layers, Our body will build on a thousand stories in which we will be parachuted without context, before being soon torn to the benefit of a new story. The slices of life follow each other before disappearing as suddenly as they had appeared...
Accumulation film
From the first sequences of the film, one understands that it will be difficult not to be carried away by the flow of his story. The long sequences of exchanges lead to introspection, to the establishment of an intimate relationship with the documentary depicting a place that everyone knows, sometimes nearby, rarely for good news. And if Simon's camera never sheds in sensationalism, voyeurism or excess pathos, the multiple relationships that the viewer has with the different patients captured by the director's objective are shaken. What will happen to this girl coming to inform about an IVG when she has to tell her parents? Will this couple filmed for a few minutes be able to have this so much-wanted kid? And that woman that we see all smiles, talking about art with the director just before she passes on the billiards, what will be the outcome of her operation? So many questions will remain unanswered forever.
And it is precisely this accumulation that will break the distance imposed by the film medium. The accumulation, but also the constant search for humanity of Claire Simon which sometimes makes the stories more cruel, certainly even more upsetting. Combined with the dizzying confidence in the image that unites the three parties to work in Our body (patients, the medical profession and the entire female film team), this is enough to instill an unrivalled power in the feature film.
Powerfully feminist work
Filming the body of women in its totality, both in its suffering (almost constantly out-of-field), in its mental and bodily injuries but also in its moments of bliss gives to Our body A powerful feminist speech, rarely (never?) seen in the cinema. An important speech, of course, but also furiously free, because if Claire Simon is to portray the humanity of the caregiving body, she will also allow herself to spend time in a demonstration on gynaecological violence perpetrated by a part of the same medical body. The eyes are plural, just like the realities that come Our body. The "we" of the title then appears clearly, extends beyond the hospital cloister to all victims, sediments a community of suffering ironized by Lou, a pregnant woman affected by cancer: "We women, we're made to suffer, we've always been told that, haven't we?"
And it is probably thanks to this kind of film that we will be able more generally to envisage what centuries of patriarchy will have inflicted (and still inflicts!) physically and psychologically on the bodies, just as much as the threats that still weigh on fundamental freedoms so hard, year after year, on women.
Organized Chaos
But if theoretically and politically the documentary is rich and exciting, it also bears witness to the strange chaos surrounding this science called "medicine", which one might think frozen, total, omnipotent, but which is in fact only doubts, reconstructions and trial. From the millimetre mess of operating rooms (and this impressive Caesarean scene) to doctors confessing a shy "we don't know anything," Our body shows to what extent, despite our technological armada and our centuries of carefully recorded knowledge, the human body is complex and incomprehensible.
Our body also reveals societal changes at work, representing the issues of transition or medically assisted reproduction that it would have been impossible to envisage a few years ago. The themes that the documentary explores at all scales – emotional and Cartesian, microscopic and macroscopic – showing how these scientific advances translate into better living conditions for the patients concerned.
Capital of pain
NUTITY OF TRUTH
« I know that. »
Desperation has no wings,
Neither love,
No face,
Don't talk,
I'm not moving,
I don't look at them,
I'm not talking to them.
But I am as alive as my love and despair.
Let's quote Paul Éluard, "Mourize not to die", in his collection Capital of pain. The hospital is, in a few ways, a capital of pain. The Tragic Crossroads That Will Take Our body (the cruel irony of destiny intimately touching Claire Simon, the worthy look of this mother who comes to give birth without anyone around her, the icy answer of this woman concerning her own excision...) will be just as matched by bursts of humor and inexhaustible moments, making this place, humanity of caregivers and by extending this film a real remedy to despair. Claire Simon will never be pontifying, never giving in to easy emotion, but will create in her film millefeuille a real emotional bomb that should be approached with a well hung heart. An epic, also certainly one of the most beautiful and powerful documentaries in a long time, Our body It's worth it. Let's talk about it. He should be advised. Our humanity will only come out of it.
And when the notes of Your Pain Sung by Camille begin to play over the credits, giving us time to dry our tears and come down from an emotional crescendo in which we took the film, let's keep in mind that this unarmed overflow of the month and disarray is just a tiny part of what every member of the medical profession feels every day. The same medical body that a liberal caste is trying more and more to undermine, to transform the humanity of the hospital into a slot machine subject to the unalterable law of yield...
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 168 min
Release Date: March 19, 2024
Video format : 576p/25 - 1.77
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
Beautiful item full of elegance. I'm in my documentary period right now, it makes you want to see it!
[...] current (and often female) has not forgotten to seize it. Between the Magisterium Our body which documents from inside the turpitudes of the female body or the most recent The Lureurs [...]