‘Our Body’ Review: An Intimate, Moving, Intelligent Doc About the Frontlines of Women’s Healthcare
variety.comJessica Kiang With her deeply invested observational documentaries, London-born French filmmaker Claire Simon has amassed a body of work somewhat comparable to that of American master Frederick Wiseman, in its focus on institutions and the transitory communities they foster.
She has previously explored the teenage experience in a French high school (“Young Solitude”); the foot traffic in Gare du Nord train station (“Human Geography”); the comings and goings in Paris’ Bois de Vincennes park (“The Woods Dreams Are Made Of”); and one of the annual intake sessions at Le Fémis, the country’s leading film school (“The Competition”).
Her latest outing, “Our Body” luxuriant in length but never less than compelling, immerses us in the day-to-day drama in a French hospital, specifically the departments dedicated to women’s health, with typically compassionate and insightful results.
Typical, that is, until Simon herself unexpectedly becomes one of her own subjects. Simon’s diagnosis happens more than halfway through the 169-minute film, and it is a hallmark of the general humility of her approach, and Luc Forveille’s lucid editing, that she neither coyly avoids the subject afterwards, nor lets her story overwhelm the wider project.
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