Inside out: "Our Body"

The methodology is embodied in the title: to set the singular alongside the collective. The French filmmaker Claire Simon has come to specialise in studies of institutions: a sister to Frederick Wiseman with - perhaps inevitably, given the provenance - a touch of Agnès Varda in the mix, she broke through internationally when The Graduation, her study of the national film school La Fémis, won a documentary prize at Venice in 2016. With Our Body, Simon spends nearly three hours observing daily life on the women's wards of the Hôpital Tenon in Paris, starting with very specific case studies before broadening and heightening her focus as her own body becomes a subject for investigation. She opens, however, with a longish sequence - longer than many of us might expect to spend in a doctor's surgery - in which a female physician questions a 15-year-old Muslim girl who's fallen pregnant after having unprotected sex with her boyfriend. The doctor's line of questioning extends beyond bare-bones medical detail to ascertain how the news of this unplanned pregnancy has been received by the girl's parents; just by sitting and watching, Simon establishes how this child finds herself at the centre of a conflict, her inchoate form already subject to the claims and concerns of others. This theme recurs as Our Body moves from consultations to operations and recuperation, as it hops between transitioning teenagers, menopausal women and mothers-to-be. Even before anybody on screen can be seen reaching for the speculum, the body - and the female body in particular - is presented as a battleground, with doctors on site as arbiters, peacemakers, rebuilders and caregivers.

What's extraordinary about Simon's film - and much of it does seem extraordinary - is that it shows us next to nothing that might be deemed extraordinary. Although this camera briefly notes the presence outside the hospital gates of women protesting against the more heavyhanded forms of gynaecology - establishing some boundaries, if you like - Simon doesn't come this way to expose any medical scandal or shortfall; instead, she films exactly that treatment we'd hope to receive in any enlightened healthcare system. A male physician speaks with admirable frankness and clarity to a 17-year-old transitioning from female to male about their options, should they want to have children in later life; a woman facing a mastectomy is guided through the finer points of reconstructive surgery. Set against this reassuringly ordinary chat, there is the grand science fiction of the Tenon's operating theatres, where lasers are steered and activated remotely by surgeons working beneath giant hoods to shut out any external distraction. Again, the sight is both ordinary (standard operating practice for any 21st century hospital) and extraordinary (a setpiece extracted from one patient's endometriosis). Yet even the film's quieter, more humdrum interactions set you to thinking about the nature of the institution, and our place within it. I spent some of the film wondering whether there would be time and space in our stressy, rickety, maxed-out NHS for any British filmmaker to attempt a comparable study, or whether the need to get one patient out the door and another one in would preclude it. Would the cracks immediately start to show, as they never seem to do here?

At every stage, the trust Simon established with subjects from evidently diverse backgrounds appears as great as that these patients place in their doctors. Maybe we're all just loosening up around cameras, but it still seems an uncommon feat on Simon's part to have gathered three hours of acutely, often uncomfortably personal testimony: words and emotions pulled from the very heart of fearful and/or exhausted human forms. You may not know what it is to endure fertility problems, hot flushes or skipped periods, but you'll remember what it is to feel unease in some core part of your being; and while you're unlikely to know how to carry out the radical vulvectomy one doc mentions in passing, you'll already sense the pain, both physical and psychic, lurking in such a phrase. Yet Our Body goes about its rounds with the calm bedside manner of a gifted med student, sitting just off-centre of the patient-doctor axis, watching and learning, and somehow even seeing past everybody's facemasks, because Simon was filming at the tailend of Covid, that moment when we all suddenly became ultra-aware of our own bodies, and the impact they can have on others. The result counts among the most profound examples of pandemic cinema, as the existential threat is front and centre - and never more so than when Simon herself receives a diagnosis of breast cancer. This really is an extraordinary development: it's as though the filmmaker was so in synch with her subjects that her body decided it was her turn. Yet Simon affords herself the same dignity as any other of the Tenon's patients, and presents her body as one among many, in much the same boat as the young Spanish woman informed she has ovarian cancer via a translation app, or - the real heartbreaker here - the bedbound greyhair whose chemo has failed to take. The singular and the collective; the miracles of life, and its myriad miseries. In such sequences as that in which a sperm is injected by hand into an unfertilised egg, and again as a new mother greets her mewling child with a line no scriptwriter could have landed on ("after nine months of complicity, we meet at last": our body, indeed), this generally unprepossessing-looking film starts to feel major indeed: a prequel to every documentary, every film ever pushed into the world. Art, cancer, conception, compassion: it starts with us and within us.

Our Body is currently streaming via MUBI.