Nenette (Nicolas Philibert, 2010)

Is it disengenuous to suggest, as a documentary maker, that you have no agenda and you are letting a story tell itself without trying to make the story follow your idea of what it should be? This is the claim of Nicolas Philibert. That he wants the story to tell itself and for the audience to make of it what they will. While I don't feel that Philibert forces his opinion I do think that as a director you chose the scenes, you chose the order and you edit as you wish. Which provides, in some small way, a structure and story of your choice.

But honestly, that is nit picking (orangutans - nit picking - geddit?!) at best. Because in comparison with a lot of what passes for cinematic entertainment this film is thought provoking, intelligent and achingly original.



It brings up questions of the justification of keeping animals enclosed for human entertainment and/or education, how apes become a mirror to ourselves and how we feel as humans, whether work and a purpose is more pleasurable than leisure and even incest and contraception. I kid you not.

The camera shows the inhabitants of the enclosure only. Nenette, a 40 year old orangutan who has been in captivity for 38 years, her son and another mother and child. We hear human voices, school children, a Japanese tourist, a romantic widow, and Nenette's keepers but we don't see them. The incredibly bored and sad seeming face of Nenette dominates the screen for much of the time. And in this I fall into one of the traps that the film sets, or at least raises for our contemplation. Is she bored or sad? Because she is close to a human genetically can we relate our emotions to her? Are we mistaking inactivity for morose behaviour? Really, the answer we come to is entirely up to us.



While one commentator seems slightly unhinged as she relates herself to the orangutan are we that far off as the audience in wanting to apply meaning to everything. In apparently not doing it himself is Philibert making us question our navel gazing nature? Our absolute insistence that we must assess and make sense of everything. Or is she just a personable animal in a cage who likes to drink her tea, eat her yoghurt and take it easy, giving her old bones a rest for the final years?