You may think you are not the audience for a three-hour French documentary on health care. You are—pardon my saying so—extremely wrong. Allow me to say a word or two further. Modest spoilers ahead, as much as there can be spoilers for French documentaries on health care.
Claire Simon’s documentary Our Body (now streaming on the Criterion Channel) is shot entirely within the confines of a women’s hospital in Paris. One after the other, we watch unnamed patients sitting in blandly decorated, poorly lit exam rooms together with doctors and nurses, discussing everything from abortions to gender-affirming care to fertility treatment. The style is distinctly in the shadow of Frederick Wiseman (Hospital, In Jackson Heights). There are no introductory title cards, no voiceover, no identifying tags for the people on screen. We are merely present as an array of women discuss the most intimate physical matters of their own lives, all of which may lead us to a conjoined gratitude and wonder at our being present in the first place.
Near the end of the film, a middle-aged woman nervously fidgets in a waiting room, crossing her legs and retying her shoes. An MRI has turned up cancerous nodes in her breast, and the doctor gently tells her she will have to have a mastectomy. The woman briefly puts her head down mournfully on the desk, then sits up, clutching her hands to her masked face as she asks about reconstructive surgery and chemotherapy. The doctor is patient and precise; this is clearly not the first of these conversations he has had today, and yet his tone is soothing, without offering unwarranted hope. Nothing that happens in this room is unusual or extraordinary, but our feeling of being present as the workaday heroism of modern medicine takes place is intense.
“OK,” she tells the doctor after a long, ragged breath, accepting her fate. “It’s not as if I’m the first.” She asks, in polite and circuitous language, that she not have to have the mastectomy: “If you could avoid taking off my breast, that would suit me.” The doctor assures her that he does the same for all his patients, and that the treatment, whatever it may end up being, will be fit into her work schedule to the best of the hospital’s abilities.
“You see to the film,” the doctor tells her, “and I’ll see to you.” The Wiseman-esque approach, withholding all commentary and clarification, has been used to deliver an unexpected hammer-blow.
This unidentified woman crying in her chair is Claire Simon herself, whom we have not previously seen onscreen. She tells the doctor that she had an inkling that there would be bad news in the offing, which was why she had asked if it might be possible to film their meeting.
There is no particular reason why seeing Simon receive her diagnosis should affect us any more than any of the other women who struggle with the burdens of their all-too-fallible bodies, but the belated realization that the director of our film is here, too, wrestling in real time with horrible news, is a profound underscoring of the film’s title. It is an act of remarkable generosity of spirit to not only ask others to share their experiences onscreen, but to be willing to share her own, as well. Simon’s response is heart-wrenching not because it is different from all the other women she has filmed here, but because it is so much the same.
Our body means everyone’s bodies. No one is exempt from frailty and illness and death. This is not a story about other people, whose travails are foreign or unfamiliar. This is about the common fate of all women, with the director humbly and powerfully slotting herself in as merely one more link in the chain.