Monday 18 March 2024

O brother, where art thou?: "Drive-Away Dolls"


Drive-Away Dolls
 is simply trying too hard. For his first film since a (reportedly amicable) parting of the creative ways from brother Joel, Ethan Coen has paired up with writer-editor-spouse Tricia Cooke, and contrived a would-be romp about odd-couple young lesbians (uptight Geraldine Viswanathan and DTF Margaret Qualley) making their way across pre-millennial America in a hire car that - unbeknownst to them - contains sensitive equipment: a case full of dildos modelled on the members of the country's most powerful men. If you think that sounds forced, you ain't seen nothing yet. The girls' haphazard progress, pursued by goons, is set out in wonky camera angles and crash zooms even a first-year film student might find gauche; these are linked by clangingly wacky or pointlessly trippy scene transitions. Plentiful girl-on-girl activity, meanwhile, indicates this is the work of middle-aged creatives who've watched queer-themed material break out at the box office in recent times and hoped they, too, might get in on the action. One oddity - one area where Coen and Cooke really weren't trying hard enough - is that no attempt is made to situate the heroines' sapphism in the context of post-kd lang, pre-Peaches America; it's all tongues, no trousers, and given how cheap and naff much of the film looks, it forms the basis of a movie that often resembles the American equivalent of a British sex comedy made with National Lottery funding in 1999. Was it that the Coens operated their own, sibling-exclusive system of checks and balances? (The goofball Ethan grounding the higher-brow Joel, whose solo debut was that chiaroscuro redo of Macbeth; Joel conjuring memorable images from his brother's yaks and yuks.) Either way, there are no memorable images in Drive-Away Dolls, and the actors seem to have been left to themselves for the most part: Qualley affects a bouncy Southern twang that only ever strikes the ear as rehearsal-room put-on, while the supporting cast contains a one-for-the-ages rarity in a bad Beanie Feldstein performance. Tricked out to a flimsy 80 minutes, it isn't long enough to irk and irritate as it might, and I quite liked the flickers we hear of Carter Burwell's score, though I suspect these were sparingly applied, lest they remind us of all the worthwhile Coen endeavours we could be watching instead. It's bad enough that Hall and Oates have undergone a separation, but these guys too?

Drive-Away Dolls is now showing in selected cinemas. 

Saturday 16 March 2024

Devil's advocate: "Shaitaan"


Shaitaan finds the Hindi mainstream cribbing ideas from elsewhere again. In this case, it's from last year's Vash, a well-received Gujarati horror flick seized upon by producer-star Ajay Devgn as an opportunity to once more inhabit the role of hypervigilant patriarch with which he's enjoyed some success over recent years. In 2015's clever thriller Drishyam, itself a remake of a noted regional title, Devgn took extreme measures to protect his offspring's virtue; now he's a bejumpered paterfamilias trying to halt the malevolent force that gains entry to his household via a suggestible teenage daughter. (If any of this sounds overbearing, we should give Devgn credit for being one of the few Indian stars of a certain age who appears genuinely comfortable playing dad roles, rather than initiating onscreen romances with actresses young enough to be his granddaughter.) The set-up here is basically Pasolini's Theorem, with a dash of The Vanishing at the start, and a fiery Padmaavat flourish towards the end. Pausing at a roadside eaterie en route to a family break, Devgn's four-strong party - made up by wife Jyoti (Jyothika), daughter Janhvi (Janki Bodiwala, a holdover from Vash) and son Dhruv (Anngad Raaj) - is approached by one Vanraj Kashyap (R. Madhavan), a fellow traveller who appears personable enough until he slips Janhvi a sweet that is clearly some kind of gateway drug; soon, she's eating uncontrollably, letting this charmer into the family's well-furnished holiday home (uh-oh), and making novel use of a swing set to terrorise her sibling. At first glance, it's a standard-issue good-versus-evil fable with a moral as simple as never take sweets from a stranger or - for any onlooking dads - keep a close eye on those with designs on your daughters. Gradually, however, Shaitaan reveals itself as altogether more complicated, not least because this isn't just an Ajay Devgn star vehicle.


In 2018, Shaitaan's director Vikas Bahl was accused of sexual assault by a former employee of his production company Phantom Films; this allegation was followed by further accusations of sexual harassment by actresses Kangana Ranaut and Nayani Dixit, who'd appeared in Bahl's putatively feminist 2014 travelogue Queen. No charges were brought, but the ensuing furore resulted in Phantom Films' dissolution. (This process in itself proved messy: after Bahl's partners in the company, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, provided formal statements on the matter, Bahl threatened to sue for defamation.) The director has worked steadily post-lockdown - signing off on three films in three years - but Shaitaan is Bahl's first big hit since his return to action. You can see why: this is a proper horror movie, as opposed to the militaristic flagwavers currently being shoved down the mass audience's neck, and one with both a well-rehearsed premise and a sly, insinuating performance from Madhavan to recommend it. (The latter really is good, feigning sincere hurt whenever anyone accuses him of being the Devil incarnate. Compared to Madhavan, the other performers strike the eye as a little bland, mere puppets.) Without the backstory, Shaitaan might have stood as the kind of modest, manageable genre proposition by which a troubled creative might well rehabilitate himself within a forgiving industry.

Except something genuinely malevolent seems to be lurking beneath the film's inch-thick surface: it shows through not just in the name attached to the villain (no coincidence, surely), but in the numerous scenes in which Madhavan's seducer persuades the entranced Janhvi to slap herself, or dance for him, or cry harder and louder - giving this captive soul direction, as in an audition that's got completely out of hand. Here, Shaitaan appears to be openly mocking anyone who's been tracking its maker's progress. You want to see what an abuse of power looks like?, these scenes cackle, I'll show you what an abuse of power looks like. This is a reach, granted, but Bahl's film kept reminding me of those Bergman movies that centred conjurors and hypnotists because its maker realised they were an allegory for the control we can wield over our fellow man. Shaitaan isn't The Magician; at best, it's unusually potent hackwork, a B-movie that benefits from an A-movie budget and a metatext that pulses like a migraine. Yet it falls closer to the dark side than one might prefer from a Friday or Saturday night entertainment, leaving us with much the same queasy feeling we'd get from sitting through another Woody Allen comedy about a middle-aged man mooning over a teenager. It's certainly committed to what it's doing and showing - hellbent would be another word, its maker palpably more defiant than contrite - but if you come this way hoping to separate the art from the artist, or the undeniable force of a movie from its unseemly context, forget it: a director accused of sexual impropriety really has made a big hit movie that is unmistakably premised on the pliability and susceptibility of young women. Don't bring popcorn; take all available precautions.

Shaitaan is now playing in selected cinemas.

Friday 15 March 2024

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 8-10, 2024):

1 (1) Dune: Part Two (12A) **
2 (3) Wicked Little Letters (15)
3 (2) Bob Marley: One Love (12A)
4 (4Migration (U)
5 (new) Imaginary (15)
6 (new) Shaitaan (15) **
7 (new) Titanic: The Musical (PG)
8 (6) Wonka (PG) ***
9 (10) Sami Swoi. Początek (12A)
10 (5) Madame Web (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:
3. Origin
4. City of God


DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (4) Wonka (PG) ***
2 (new) Migration (U)
3 (5) Dune: Part One (12) **
4 (1) Anyone But You (15)
5 (3) Poor Things (18) **
6 (2) The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (12)
7 (6) Oppenheimer (15) ****
8 (13) Barbie (12) ***
9 (new) Napoleon (15) **
10 (16) Elvis (12) **


My top five: 
1. Anatomy of a Fall
4. Wonka

 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Friday, Channel 4, 11.05pm)
2. Out of Sight [above] (Saturday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
3. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.10pm)
4. Phantom Thread (Sunday, BBC2, 11.40pm)
5. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.50am)

Punchdrunk love: "Fight Club" at 25


I saw 
Fight Club for the first time on the morning it opened in Paris in late 1999. Queuing up for a 9.30am screening in Pigalle: my fresher-faced self, a clutch of burly bruisers in leather jackets set to be palpably disappointed by the film before them, and an elegant, Deneuve-like older woman in furs who wafted down to the front row and spent the entire movie laughing like Juliette Binoche. It was a screening that more or less crystallised early responses to David Fincher's film, not least because the six of us were just about the only folks in the world paying to see it that weekend. After taking a notable box-office dive on first release, Fight Club would eventually be reclaimed, first by film buffs waving the DVD as proof as Fincher's emergent virtuosity, then by online edgelords, trolls and incels, reframing a black comedy as the bloodiest of red flags. The question of who should really be laughing at Fight Club abides. As Mme Deneuve doubtless understood, the varyingly grim jokes of the film, ripped from Chuck Palahniuk's cult novel, come at the expense of men; it's alpha lone wolf Fincher, a director who'd likely refuse to join any club that would have him as a member, seeking to skewer masculinity much as he'd done in 1997's underrated The Game and would do in 2010's The Social Network and the shortlived Netflix series Mindhunter

For any newcomers, this is the story of a perilously lonely boy (with "a house full of condiments, but no food", as Jim Uhls' script has it) who starts listening to an inner voice urging him to give into his worst instincts. (Fortuitously, this reissue lands between two high-profile films centred on protagonists with imaginary friends: we've been primed.) Beating himself and others up in underground gladiatorial arenas hardly improves his condition: he's soon homeless, bleeding, being cuckolded by his own subconscious and well on his way to becoming public enemy number one. His downward spiral allows Fincher to flag just how easily certain men are misled towards violent, (self-)destructive activity. Yet one reason this late 20th century endeavour has endured so is that it feels very much of the 21st century: simultaneously doomy and snarky while ambiguous and slippery, bound up with cults of personality (for Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, the film's strutting imp of the perverse, read Tate or Trump), a broadly despairing view of the state of play between the sexes, and the misplaced anger that follows from our understanding that we need to shake off capitalism but haven't quite figured out how best to achieve that aim. And that's before the collapsing buildings the movie arrives at, a trailer for non-movie spectacles to come.

I think we might still concede Fight Club is less forcefully of a piece than it seemed a quarter-century ago, when the critic Alexander Walker was driven to declare its nihilism a danger to civilised society. Time and a clearer eye reveal the film to be composed of showoffy segments, overlaid with Ed Norton's droning voiceover and a pounding Dust Brothers score, which highlight Fincher's unarguable camera and editing prowess: the plane crash, the sex scene, the soap making, the fights. Nothing really connects; only in its final act does the film gather real momentum, rather than circling a drain while gurgling loudly. At this point, Fincher was still thinking in grabby setpieces, trying to make a name and a career for himself; we may all of us prefer the subtler, sublimated craft and guile of The Social Network and Mindhunter over these barely controlled explosions. Fincher's business here was provocation: though the twist ending loosely ties Fight Club to late 1999's runaway hit The Sixth Sense, for most of its running time, it feels closer to an American translation of Lars von Trier's The Idiots, another study of a fraying collective conducted with cackling intelligence. (Either that, or it's Drop Dead Fred rewritten by the Unabomber.)

All that said, it is often wildly funny, or howlingly inappropriate, its tossed-off wisecracks pushing some way beyond those of, say, South Park or Family Guy; you can see why the edgelords seized upon it, but also why Fincher wound up making the comparably distasteful Gone Girl, which I half-suspect may be Fight Club for girls. And Fincher was always good with actors, driving them to commit and subvert as befits. Incels seem to miss this, but wiggly Norton - one of the great worms of 1990s film - only becomes heroic late on after trying to take responsibility for his crimes; Pitt remains a pretty terrific articulation of a pose most men will have wanted to throw at some point, even if it stands for nothing and might get you killed. The bonus is Helena Bonham Carter at her most withering; you have to overlook her Marla if you want to appropriate Fight Club as an unapologetic push for men's rights. (Further down the callsheet, two from the funny-how-things-turn-out file: a TV news reporter is played by Lauren Sánchez, newly prominent as the main squeeze of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos; and it still strikes me as faintly ironic that our hero should be seen to bottom out upon beating Jared Leto to a pulp, "I felt like destroying something beautiful" et al.)

Even after 25 years, we haven't yet fully metabolised Fight Club - what it means, what it represents, where it ranks - which probably accounts for the ongoing arguments. Fincher pushed on regardless, but Uhls has had only one more script produced in the years since, 2008's bland Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper. Like an off-colour joke, it might just be unrepeatable, although elements of the film seemed to factor into the following year's American Psycho (another droll rendering of a notionally unfilmable novel) and the Jackass series (first transmission: October 2000), which was - which remains, somewhat implausibly - Fight Club reenacted by clowns for shits and giggles. But extinction was where everything was heading: within ten years, and after a decade characterised by insecurity on various fronts, American movies had been reduced to childproofed superheroics and digimated cutesiness, with barely a single Tyler Durden around to splice a welcome transgression or two into the mix. Raw meat stuffed with gelignite, Fincher's film still requires marking as dangerous - I wouldn't take a date to it - but we'd do well to reclaim some of its swagger from the nuts on the Internet. Peer beyond its sloganeering and sixpacks, and you can spy a moment when our movies still took risks, and revolution of multiple kinds remained some sort of possibility.

Fight Club returns to cinemas nationwide from today. 

Thursday 14 March 2024

Anatomy of a fall: "Manjummel Boys"


Though the Malayalam word-of-mouth hit
Manjummel Boys tells a tale of fortitude, resilience and heroism, it distinguishes itself by putting precisely zero of its leading men in military khaki. (One obvious reason for its success: it's offering moviegoers a break from the grunting norms of the current Hindi mainstream.) Recent films and events to commemorate 2018's Tham Luang cave rescue may well have inspired the writer-director Chidambaram to dramatise a local variant - another nervy true-life descent, dating back to 2006. The most immediate difference is that those at the centre of this rescue weren't lithe, slender kids, rather ten headstrong, fully-grown men: balding, paunchy loafers, tailchasers, drunks and other troublemakers who, as we join them crashing a wedding, have seen their Keralan workers' collective split into two factions, a source of ongoing conflict seemingly only exacerbated by regular tug-of-war contests. Already, you can spot how some facility with a rope - a capacity for taking the strain and working as a team - might be of benefit when, during a seat-of-the-pants lads' trip to Kodaikanal, the ground opens up beneath one of their party, sending him tumbling down an especially deep and dark abyss. In the rescue effort that follows, we possibly find another reason for Manjummel Boys' success: almost shruggingly, with the insouciance of any other genre film, it presents a vision of unity that may be difficult to see anywhere else in the India of 2024, a narrative about disparate folks putting grudges aside and pulling together in a common cause.

While this narrative throws up idiosyncratic regional variations - the Boys come this way to pay homage to a musical number in a Kamal Haasan movie - it's an example of a film where both the trajectory and structure are, from an early stage, reassuringly predictable. Simply put, the Boys spend the first half getting into a tight spot; they spend the second trying to get out of it. For a while, Chidambaram treats this story as the basis for a hangout movie, observing his leads chatting shit and roughhousing one another. (The stag-party abrasiveness is smoothed by a soundtrack that forsakes bangers for jams: ambient beats you might stumble onto on pirate radio at three in the morning.) So relaxed is the opening movement it comes as some surprise when the film suddenly snaps to and gets serious. Asked whether their pal could conceivably have survived his drop, a passing guide peers into the void and mutters "It's Satan's decision". (This particular crevice, we learn, is known locally as "the Devil's Kitchen".) We don't have to be told the significance when the heavens open and the cave begins to flood with sheet rain. Having handed these characters a dire problem, Chidambaram nimbly, briskly sets about solving it, and there is undeniable interest and pleasure to be derived from watching that, as the long tradition of disaster movies would indicate. Yet Manjummel Boys isn't just nuts, bolts and winches; there are appreciable character beats, too. It's a smart move on Chidambaram's part to withhold the fate of the fallen, adding one genuine note of uncertainty that is sustained with tremendous skill through the second half, an agonising descent into a suffocatingly serpentine sinkhole that either represents inspired location work, superlative production design, or a bit of both. This, finally, is what audiences have been talking excitedly about: as taut and fraught a suspense sequence as you'll witness in the months between now and Furiosa, nailing us to our seat with the sight of lives and bonds hanging in the balance. Through to the deft coda - a signature dash of edit-suite craftsmanship after all the heavy lifting - Chidambaram gets the best out of his terrific ensemble, set to convey a steadfastness in the face of adversity that shows up the haphazard, frankly half-arsed response of the authorities and might just serve as a lesson to others besides. At the very least, there is more sincere and stirring brotherhood on display throughout Manjummel Boys than one could discern in the last half-dozen Salman Khan pictures.

Manjummel Boys is now playing in selected cinemas.

Wednesday 13 March 2024

An education: "Origin"


The eminent film scholar David Bordwell may have passed last month, but pressing questions of film form linger on in his wake. Kaouther Ben Hania's recent Oscar nominee Four Daughters demonstrated - unintentionally, I suspect - how the hybrid commingling of drama and documentary can do as much to obscure as reveal the truth of any matter. Claire Simon's Our Body, by contrast, suggested old-school observational documentary craft remains as vital as ever to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Now we have Origin, in which Ava duVernay - a filmmaker with form in both drama (2014's Selma) and documentary (2016's 13TH) - sets out to film what she's described as "the biography of a book". The book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a non-fiction bestseller of 2020 in which the Black academic and writer Isabel Wilkerson argued it was caste rather than race (and, a corollary, casteism rather than racism) that most closely governs how society operates. 

Arguably, Wilkerson was splitting hairs - that most academic of pastimes - but her theory pushed beyond skin colour in search of something more deeply rooted yet: the discontent that would explain both the white-on-white hatred of the Holocaust and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the brown-on-brown atrocities of latter-day India. Her fieldwork now yields a drama describing the process whereby Wilkerson (played in duVernay's film by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) - an observer as we join her, "on hiatus" in her own words - was first persuaded to put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard, a mixed bag of circumstances that include the Trayvon Martin shooting, much bathtub and bedtime reading, the loss of her partner and mother in quick succession, and subsequent research trips to Berlin and Delhi. It is an unconventional way of approaching the material, to say the least. Non-fiction books such as Wilkerson's, steeped in theory and historical analysis, tend to generate non-fiction films; it would be neither inaccurate nor strictly a diss to describe duVernay's film as soap-adjacent. With that comes an element of creative jeopardy, for Origin risks interpretation not as a text on how we might collectively negotiate and resolve the issues under discussion, but something far more niche, borderline narcissistic: how a tenured Black creative - be that Wilkerson or duVernay or anyone with money enough to travel and test a theory - negotiates such issues. Could it be that Origin is less interested in how society is reformed and redeemed than in how publishing advances are earned?

Well, nope - or not entirely, and therein lies Origin's odd sort of success. Granted, duVernay's film may still be primarily of interest to writers, historians and the chattering classes. What we're watching is, after all, the construction of a grand unifying theory, an idea that might connect the Berlin of 1939 to Charlottesville in 2017. (The movie is A Beautiful Mind with hate crimes in place of equations.) Yet the risk pays off in scenes you wouldn't normally see in this kind of prestige statement drama: Wilkerson calling in a plumber (Nick Offerman, glowering under a MAGA cap) to fix a blocked pump, or attending cookouts with best pal Niecy Nash-Betts, a surrogate for those of us without an MA. The scene where Wilkerson first arrives in India may be the most accurate filming yet of what it is to be a Westerner arriving in India for the first time, but then, at all points, duVernay is interested in the ways theory gets developed, tested and refined in conversation with the wider world. A lot, then, depends on the writing, which is passionate, if every so often on the nose: as the inspirational ballad poured over the closing credits like treacle underlines, Origin was conceived not as a rigorous Straub-Huillet interrogation of our shared past, but rousing awards-season product, no viewer left behind. Yet scene-by-scene, the actors sold me on it, particularly Ellis-Taylor, who's been quietly excellent for a while (Ray, If Beale Street Could Talk, King Richard), and here really does seem to be pulling something notable together: a theory, a life, a way forward for her fellow man. 

If you find the film working for you in any way, it's almost certainly because duVernay prioritises human experience over the abstract and conceptual: what she's chosen to film is how the facts Wilkerson unearthed affect the characters, realising that that's what will most forcefully affect us in turn. This director holds to a sentimental view of history and class relations, but much as Wilkerson's theory can be boiled down to our old friends love and hate, concepts beyond colour, so too casteism invites description as irrational and emotive - an arbitrary imposition that arguably merits dramatising as much as it does documenting. In its second half, Origin alights upon a rather brilliant thesis: that just as hate spread across the world, from Jim Crow-era America to Nazi Germany and back to our Trump-haunted present, so too might love and resistance, much as the reformist Indian politician B.R. Ambedkar drew strength from the resilience of the African-Americans he observed on one U.S. trip. Within the narrow corridor of awards season 2023-24, this heartfelt, all-embracing film by a noted Black creative was clearly outmanoeuvred by a far cooler, more rigorous proposition by a middle-aged white bloke from North London, yet it struck me that both duVernay and Jonathan Glazer were working towards much the same goals of engagement and enlightenment. By going a funny way around, by refusing merely to stripmine its material for a rollcall of astonishing and/or alarming truths, Origin stands alone as a sort of prologue or prequel - its own origin story, directing us back towards the book and the possibility it holds of becoming better citizens in a kinder, more just society.

Origin is now playing in selected cinemas.

Tuesday 12 March 2024

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.