 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
| Nénette | |||
"You may know French documentarian Nicolas Philibert for To Be and to Have, his charming 2002 look at a little rural schoolhouse, its sensibly idealistic teacher and his too-cute-for-words students. The filmmaker’s latest once again puts us in the position of thoughtful observer, but this time the subject is the strong, silent type: a 40-something orangutan named Nénette, one of the more popular residents of a venerable Paris zoo." – Nicolas Rapold, Time Out New York "It’s impossible to watch Nicolas Philibert’s new film without a Darwinian frisson of anxiety, and an animal-liberationist spasm of rage. Nénette is a 40-year-old female orangutan in a Parisian zoo: she has been kept here almost all her life. Philibert’s camera is trained solely on her, and some other ape companions — humans are not shown, but we hear the chattering voices of zoo visitors and the thoughtful voices of various naturalists and experts. Our gaze is kept on Nénette’s face. She is watching us, while we are watching her. Nénette looks clinically depressed. As Philibert shows us a close-up of her eyes, full of sadness and pain, it seems just too obvious to say that Nénette seems human. Perhaps it is that we are ape-like." – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian "Nénette is a film devoid of human faces, the camera merging with the more than half-million visitors who traipse past the orangutan’s cage every year. We hear their voices, these mothers and children and couples, their words revealing the complexity of our relationship to caged wildlife. Is Nénette depressed, they wonder, or just lonely? Quiet and watchful, the object of their fascination leans on her gnarled knuckles, straw clinging to her mat of ginger hair. She arrived from Borneo in 1972, has survived three mates and produced four offspring. Once she was lively (“The bane of the place,” says an older zookeeper); now she looks passive and glum, quieted by age and arthritis. Or something else. Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no anti-zoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity. Nénette may be better off than her endangered kin, but as we watch her delicately pour tea into the yogurt container that holds her contraceptive pill (she lives with her son, and the zoo is keen to avoid procreative embarrassment), that knowledge gives us small comfort. Yet Nénette is loved, with some people stopping by every day. A keeper likens them to those visiting a relative in prison — which, when you come to think of it, is exactly what they are doing." – Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times |
|
||
| France 2010 | |||
Director: Nicolas Philibert 70 mins, DV (16:9) In French, with English subtitles Tekapo Film Society |
|||
