The Mademoiselle and the Doctor at Academy Cinema

In the documentary 'The Mademoiselle and the Doctor' Lisette Nigot talks of 'enlisting before being called up'.

The title suggests a French comedy of manners or perhaps even a slightly saucy tale. But there's much more to The Mademoiselle and the Doctor than meets the eye.

The doctor is well enough known: Philip Nitschke, dubbed Dr Death by the tabloids - and even some broadsheets - across the Tasman, is the high-profile campaigner for voluntary euthanasia who, while lobbying for law change and carefully sidestepping the existing laws, has developed devices and methods to assist the terminally ill to take their own lives.

But few would have heard of the mademoiselle if it had not been for the manner of her death. Lisette Nigot, a French-born, Perth-based retired academic, died at home, by her own hand, in November 2002, a month before her 80th birthday. She was in perfect - well, certainly good - health. She was not depressed or even unhappy. In Janine Hosking's riveting documentary she tells us that she just wanted to get out while the going was good.

The film follows Lisette as she discusses with Nitschke the practicalities of her plan for a dignified exit. And, odd though it seems to say so now, she is a star.

Her eyes sparkle with an almost impish glee as she looks back on seven eventful decades. In heavily accented but impeccable English, she speaks of the many lovers she has enjoyed and the rich satisfactions of life which included doing PR for the Waldorf Astoria in New York where she hosted the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Sinatra.

The metaphor she uses to describe her planned exit - she says she is enlisting before being called up - shows that she is sensitive to the mortality so few of us intelligently confront.

"It's certainly one of her better lines," says Hosking, a former television journalist. "She has a humorous way about her and I think what unhinges people a little bit is to see someone speaking plainly and quietly and sometimes with humour about death. It was very important for her to be able to control her own death and not get to the point where her life was in the hands of other people. She says in the film that life will never be better so she was looking at things in a very practical way."

Hosking says the approach to the subject suggested itself early on.

"I didn't want to make a film about Philip," she said. "But I knew he was running these Exit workshops [discussing voluntary euthanasia] and I decided to go along."

The workshops led her to Nigot who was planning her own death within months.

"She was initially not keen to go on camera but she wanted to support Philip's cause. And because her story raised a whole new area of what was being called 'rational suicide', it seemed to me logical to follow the debate down that track."

The filmmaker has taken some hits in the Australian press for her conspicuous detachment. "This strategy of leaving its core ethical questions largely unaddressed or addressed obliquely is interesting but not entirely commendable," intoned one newspaper. But Hosking explains that Nigot would have had no room in the last weeks of her life for a filmmaker with attitude.

"Lisette was a person who just wouldn't have dealt with me judging her. I tried to ask her the questions anyone would ask her but it was never going to be a documentary where you interview the politicians or the anti-euthanasia lobby or the religious experts because that would have taken it away from Lisette's story and it is a very personal story. It's actually not about the issue - although you learn about the issue; it's about a woman making a choice."

Well, maybe. Hosking deliberately and provocatively includes a flashback eight years ago to the pitiful sight of Broken Hill taxi driver Max Bell, spectre-thin and begging for release, as Nitschke looks on helplessly. It's one of the movie's most shocking moments but it's the only seriously polemical one. And Hosking insists that she remains on the sidelines.

"I don't think [Nigot's suicide] should be seen as a noble, heroic thing to do," she says. "I also don't think it should be seen that she took the coward's way out. I just think it is the choice of one woman."

For all her detachment, she felt sad when Nigot died (and, for the record, the film maintains a dignified and respectful distance from the moment).

"You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel sad about someone dying that you have been close to. But I would have felt sadder if she had ended up desperate and morose and living the kind of life she didn't want. That would have been worse."

The film is also notable for being a rounded portrait of Nitschke who has come to us mostly through soundbites and tendentious television interviews. Here he emerges as a tender, caring, complicated and profoundly humane figure.

"I was most impressed by the way he deals with elderly people," says Hosking. "He speaks to them as equals and doesn't patronise them.

"Because he's an activist and engages with the issue so regularly he is easy to target as 'Dr Death' but if he doesn't talk about it, the issue disappears. Polls say 75 per cent of Australians think that terminally ill people should have the right to die but that isn't reflected in legislation so Philip keeps pushing the issue.

"Here he is engaging with a healthy person and calling it rational suicide, which tends to divide people even further. But he feels it's worth doing because a lot of elderly people are asking about these issues."

* The Mademoiselle and the Doctor screens as part of the World Cinema Showcase.

On screen

*What: World Cinema Showcase
*When and where: Academy Cinema, April 14 to May 3