Our Body (Claire Simon, 2023) (Patreon)

A film is always several things at once. To a great extent, it is a group of images and sounds that are assembled into a text, a piece of communication that has its own material relationships and formal coherence. But as a work of communication, a film always arrives within a social  and cultural context. Mostly the text remains the same, even as the social situation shifts around it. This is why rich, meaningful films have an afterlife. They resonate beyond the particular circumstances of their making.

Claire Simon's Our Body is a detailed, humanistic look at women's healthcare, broadly defined (childbirth, abortion, transgender care, gynecological and reproductive health, fertility assistance, and breast, uterine, and ovarian cancers). Simon focuses on the doctors and patients at a single state-run Parisian hospital over about a year. As such, the film takes certain things for granted, one of them being that all forms of women's and gender care are a human right. And while I think there are few things more painfully "American" than seeing oneself reflected in the cultures of others, it was not possible for me to watch Our Body in the United States, in Texas, without grappling with the disparity between what Simon depicts and what is going on around me right now.

A complete buffoon by the name of Jacob Savage wrote a broadside against the groupthink of contemporary film culture, and professional film critics in particular. And thank goodness he did! I'd reckon no one has taken film criticism to task in at least three months. But Savage (if that's his real name) takes a random potshot at Our Body, arguing that its positive reception from critics is a sign of just how out of touch we all are. "It speaks to a deep poverty of imagination," he writes, that the top rated film of 2023 would be "a three-hour French documentary chronicling the everyday operations of a gynecological ward in a Parisian hospital." He calls the choice safe, an unwillingness to "engage with the culture where it actually is."

It always seems to be those who are the most culturally and economically insulated from the rest of us -- the op-ed commentariat, the political class, the tech-bro right wing -- who loudly profess to truly understand what the rest of us do not. Savage's piss-warm take was merely irritating before I watched Our Body; having now seen exactly what Simon has accomplished, it's cynical and vulgar. As we watch this "foreign" film, we observe the ordinary exercise of personal choices that our own government is rapidly stripping away, in spite of the fact that reproductive health (including abortion) is considered a vital civil right by well over half of the voting-age population. How could anyone, regardless of their stance on political matters, not watch Our Body and immediately understand its relevance?

But let me be clear. Our Body is not just a left-leaning documentary on a hot button issue, something that flatters an audience it assumes to be like-minded. This is a remarkable, expansive work of art. We sometimes behave as though Frederick Wiseman has a monopoly on institutional portraiture and nonfiction realism, but the most impressive aspects of Our Body are those that find Simon diverging so widely from the Wiseman template. Where the American filmmaker tends toward a mosaic kind of editing, showing various aspects of his subject in a kind of overarching cinematic present, Simon has constructed Our Body as a sort of collective narrative. 

Each scene plays out at length, allowing its subjects to individuate themselves within their own situation. And Simon begins with matters of youth, conception and infancy (abortion, contraception advice, IVF, and a young F2M transgender person), moves us through childbirth (natural and assisted, routine and high-risk), then profiles women undergoing menopause, others receiving treatment for cancers, including a hysterectomy; an older trans woman who must stop taking hormones because she has reached the age at which cis women experience menopause; and finally, an elderly woman dying of terminal cancer.

But perhaps the most radical part of Our Body has to do with its maker and her willingness to, or even her insistence on, inserting herself and her own body into this narrative arc. In the second hour, we see Simon and her doctor discussing a breast cancer diagnosis. She is understandably devastated, and although she does not want to lose the breast, she recognizes that there is no other choice. As a filmmaking decision, Simon's insertion of her own medical care runs counter to an entire objectivist ethics within cinema vérité, demonstrating that there is no possibility for a creative artist to engage with a social situation without affecting it, and being affected by it.

Our Body is bookended by brief statements by Simon. At the beginning, she's riding her bike near the hospital and describing the project she's about to undertake. At the end, she is seen leaving the hospital, having completed her course of chemotherapy. Like every other woman seen in Our Body, Simon has been changed by what happened within those hospital walls. And not all of those experiences resulted in felicitous outcomes. But with its empathetic commitment to each woman's specific story, Our Body shows how vital this healthcare is. Attempts to restrict or dismantle such medical care are little more than a crime against humanity, perpetrated of course under the Orwellian banner of "life."