Rating: NR | Runtime: 115 minutes
Release Date: January 11th, 2023 (France) / April 28th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Les Films du Losange / Gratitude Films / Grasshopper Film
Director(s): Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel
Writer(s): Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Leviathan was a spectacular film. It placed us into the commercial fishing industry with a subjectively objective eye towards the reality of its world and the beauty of its chaos. Their latest collaboration seeks to do the same in the world of Parisian hospitals. With footage shot in eight different establishments, they “use the tools of medicine to create cinema” in a sort of reverse of how the medical world has utilized cinematic tools to help advance medicine. But while you definitely get a sense of that fly-on-the-wall nature with the banal conversations of doctors and uncouth demeanor of surgeons that confirms the running joke in “Scrubs” about how surgeons are the “jocks” of the medical field, De Humani Corporis Fabrica is missing Leviathan’s sense of awe.

Have I ever witnessed eye surgery or seen someone stick tubes down a man’s penis before? No. But I have been to a hospital. I have seen hospital-set TV shows and films. So, while it is new to watch a real doctor shove her entire arms into a real pregnant woman’s belly to retrieve a baby, it’s not something I couldn’t have imagined pretty accurately. Same with the visual comparisons alternating between a scope inside a human’s intestines, a container shooting through a hospital’s pneumatic tube system, and security guards wandering off-limits and graffitied catacomb-like hallways. These are obvious parallels and ubiquitous notions of “the machinery” behind “the art.” To spend two hours inside such mundane maneuverings isn’t therefore as profound in its desire to shed light on “life” as transporting me somewhere I’ll never go myself.

That’s not to say the journey isn’t worthwhile, though. I loved the candid dialogue during a prostate removal wherein the surgeon admits he isn’t an expert while others reveal they have no clue what they’re doing. One even drops the suction tube on the floor, rendering it unusable as everyone scrambles to find an alternative due to blood pooling as a result of an internal contusion that needs stitching. That’s the sort of content that you can’t get anywhere else. You can examine a placenta and a cancerous tumor on YouTube. You can’t find unedited and unsterilized video of medical doctors treating the human body as an inert object to rip open with lasers and their own hands. Ditto with a wild closing sequence inside one hospital’s hedonistic-themed “salle de garde” with frescoes that seemingly depict the staff in lewdly sexualized poses on the wall while Orgy’s “Blue Monday” cover blares.

So, there are definitely moments that prove unforgettable—just not as many as Leviathan or Castaing-Taylor’s Sweetgrass. Maybe that’s on me due to my first-hand experience with hospitals making it so I can’t pretend to be as ignorant as I am about commercial fishing or sheep herding, but unfamiliar looks at the familiar can’t help feeling familiar due to proximity and pop culture awareness. It may take on a more visceral sheen being that what we’re seeing is real as opposed to Hollywood prosthetics and computer graphics, but it’s not necessarily “uncharted territory.” And that’s what it needs to be to keep my attention when there’s no story beyond the distractingly dull narrative of two senior women roaming a public assistance facility while a man tries to escape his room. My mind too often wandered whenever we weren’t lost inside someone’s flesh.

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A scene from DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA. Courtesy of Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films.