Monkey business: "Nénette"

Here's a continuation of the French cinema's adoring fascination with women of a certain age. Thrice-married Nénette is forty years old, sports unruly tufts of reddish-brown hair, wrinkles - we can be fairly certain there's no Botox here - and noticeable extra pounds around her midriff; she lives with her three children in a cramped and perpetually busy corner of latter-day Paris. Before you settle in for another elegant slice of social realism à la française, I should point out that Nénette is an orangutan, and for 70 minutes, Nicolas Philibert's documentary observes her at rest and at play behind the glass in the enclosure she calls home in the Jardin des Plantes, while we tune into a soundtrack of comments made by her visitors and handlers alike. (In a typically Gallic touch, the distant sounds of a protest march can be heard at one point; a group of schoolchildren, meanwhile, get especially if inevitably rowdy in her presence.)

Philibert employed similar arm's-length tactics in his UK breakthrough Être et Avoir, but there the cheeky young (human) monkeys were being schooled by their master in graspable concepts - reading, writing, arithmetic - and evidently growing up, evolving even, under the camera's gaze. Nénette remains, by her very nature, aloof, fundamentally unknowable, which makes this film a trickier proposition. Like Kiarostami's Shirin, itself on some level an extended study of the female face, Nénette swiftly establishes itself as something of an exercise in watching, and a studiedly neutral one at that, not so far removed from logging into a zoo's live webcam feed for an hour or so. You could use it as an opportunity to admire the ape's natural beauty at close-ish quarters; you could - as one of the observers does late on - use Nénette's status as a stick with which to beat the anti-captivity drum, though Philibert seems to add this perspective only as an afterthought.

You could even - as I did - come to wish Philibert had dropped the pretence of total objectivity, got in the cage with his subject, and started to mix his gawping up a bit. As far as the star turn is concerned, Nénette holds our gaze perfectly well for the running time, appears animated whenever the crowd swells, and at other times, prone to sudden slumps and depressions. (In this, she would seem the consummate entertainer.) Yet this, too, is but mere projection, and perhaps only a naturalist of the Dian Fossey/Jane Goodall school would be able to tell if Nénette wasn't just reflecting or imitating that which had been installed in front of her, or was wholly indifferent to the process of filming. In Nénette, evolution counts for naught: just as Philibert asserts his right to plonk down his camera and shoot yards and yards of footage, so too the monkey retains hers to stare blankly, unrevealingly back at us.

Nénette opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.