It’s right there in the title: Claire Simon’s stunningly personal documentary “Our Body” might generally be about her own health journey, but it’s really fixated on the communal experience of occupying a female body. Our body.
While academics have tried to uncover the mystique behind women’s physiques, and narrative filmmakers have grappled with the “male gaze” permeating the female form, Simon’s “Our Body” positions the body in its strictly anatomical purposes, ranging from reproduction to even death.
Simon uses the film as both a personal journey through her own cancer diagnosis and as a general observation of the everyday operations of a gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. And while watching “Our Body,” the emphasis on public hospital is key to remember: A heartbreaking opening scene in which a high schooler seeks an abortion and is met with compassion from the hospital worker sets the tone for the delicacy that Simon brings to the entire film.
What would “Our Body” look like if it was filmed in the American healthcare system?
“Women’s bodies are shown in their beauty, as an object of desire, and yet the true reality of women’s bodies is always hidden,” Simon said in a press statement. “We can feel the lasting presence of archaic thinking: we are made to pay for sexual pleasure and the reproduction of the species through the demonization of women’s bodies, or at the very least through worry, wariness, and fear. This has determined the division of roles established by the men: we’ll take care of power, you take care of life. Men know that their existence depends upon this notion: they do not want to know where they’ve come from. The very idea that they could have been born from a woman’s desire displeases them.”
Simon’s own body plays a large part in the film, as the filmmaker appears topless and exposed, before ultimately being diagnosed with breast cancer. Simon, who narrates the film beginning with the admission of her own anxieties walking past the cemetery that borders the featured hospital, deepens the affect of “Our Body.” The film is not for the squeamish, but why should anyone bristle at the image of women’s bodies in their natural states?
And it’s not just her breasts that are filmed: It is the series of stirrups shown, with various women’s feet locked into them either to give birth or to have surgery to remove cervical cancer. It’s the stomach being sliced for a C-section; it’s the tears of a new mother grappling with the surge of postpartum hormones as her baby suckles on her chest. It’s the chants of women who were raped by their gynecologists as they protest in the streets; it’s the fear of a young adolescent inquiring about gender reassignment surgery to transition into womanhood.
While narrating, Simon laments the “crazed waltz of destinies” through the hospital corridors, filled with singular stories of individual patients that comprise a larger theme central to humanity: Women need to be taken care of, too.
“This was the moment when, through the disease, I fully joined the community that I’d been filming,” Simon said of slipping beyond just being behind the camera, but becoming a subject herself. “I already belonged as a woman, but from that point on I also shared their destiny as a patient. This is the reason why it appeared essential to me to be filmed naked, just like the others. … It’s important to see the others, to not be a woman left all alone to face the questions raised by her body, the confrontation with the doctors and the hospital as an institution — to know that there are others, that there’s a large, and strong, community of us out there.”
The “God’s Offices” and “The Competition” director certainly had a vision for “Our Body,” which comes on the heels of recent releases of “Every Body” following intersex advocates and fellow hospital documentary “De Humani Coporis Fabrica.”
Yet Simon’s “Our Body” has a key difference: The filmmaker sought out an all-female crew for the feature, which speaks volumes to the level of vulnerability those onscreen exhibit. This is a world built by women, for women; it’s the summer season of the matriarchy, dolled up in pink with “Barbie” or undressed, stripped down of any gendered expectations, with “Our Body.”
Rating: B+
Cinema Guild releases “Our Body” on Friday, August 4 at Film Forum in New York City, with a wide release to follow on Friday, August 11.