"La Fracture" in Cannes, Catherine Corsini sends Emmanuel Macron back to the hospital
“La Fracture”, by Catherine Corsini, in the running for the Palme d'Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. © Carole Bethuel
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
5 mins
Among the cinematographic works in the running for the Palme d'Or, a very cleverly woven film on the social crisis caused the most laughter in the room.
At the Cannes Film Festival,
La Fracture
seduced as a tragicomedy revisiting the great debates of French society: from "yellow vests" and police violence through the state of hospitals, to immigration and homoparentality.
Director Catherine Corsini has achieved a cinematic gem.
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The Fracture
begins with a couple in bed.
One woman snores, the other woman can't take it anymore.
On the other hand, Raf is not bothered by the noise, but Julie's silence.
Because the latter refuses to go back on her decision to separate.
And Raf refuses to accept the end of ten years together.
In the morning, Julie discovers a slew of text messages full of insults sent at night while asking her to try a new start with her ...
Laugh heartily
With their disarmingly funny acting, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Marina Foïs teach us from the start to laugh heartily at the pains, misfortunes and awkwardness of others.
Because very quickly, other much more serious subjects will arise.
Laughing at it seems to them and to us the only way to deal with despair and anger.
Their son, Elliott, 17, of whom they have also always remained in close contact "
with the biological mother
", announces them to go to the demonstration of yellow vests on the Champs-Élysées against the policies of President Macron.
At the same time, Raf takes a bad fall in front of the house and injures her elbow, so vital to her as a designer.
In the emergency room, Raf and Julie discover together on TV scenes of "war" from the demonstration, but above all the extent of the reception and miserable working conditions in the hospital.
And of course also the influx of injured from police violence during the biggest demonstration of "yellow vests".
A sequel to the shocking documentary
A Country That Keeps Wise
Nourished by numerous real facts and by a nursing assistant, Assiatou Diallo, who excellently embodies her own role, Catherine Corsini's film remains very “documentary”, but intelligently unfolds in fiction. In some ways,
The Fracture
can be seen as a fictional sequel to the shocking documentary
A Country That Keeps Wise
. David Dufresne had gathered documentary images of police violence worthy of an authoritarian state and provoking 2,500 wounded, 25 wounded and five hands torn off. Dufresne also was not limited to yellow vests. It also addressed the humiliation of young people by the police and the abuse of power.
With Catherine Corsini, it is more society than democracy that is at the center. With meticulously worked dialogues, a chiseled staging and a camera that makes us live the tensions, she arrives at her goal. The director takes advantage of the freedom given by fiction and of a certain distance from events to collide several problems at the same time. Raf thus meets Yann, a truck driver and yellow vest, whose leg was seriously injured by a police grenade ("
they made me feel like a rabbit
") during the demonstration. Very worried about his job, he prefers to take the risk of losing his leg than his job. Because the schedule of his operation is still not fixed and he must return on time with the truck.
The public hospital, the nerve center of a society
It was while thinking of this character forced to live in survival mode, seriously disappointed in politics and injured by the police, that actor Pio Marmaï, during the Cannes press conference, referred to a sentence from his Yann role: "
Macron, I would like to go to his place through the toilets and pipes and bang his face
."
The words ignited social media, but only shocked those who haven't seen
The Fracture
.
In the film, the breathless public hospital turns out to be the nerve center where it literally explodes when tear gas from the police even enters the emergency room.
On this night in the emergency room, where many certainties and certain prejudices are shattered, the sick express the misery of an entire society: vulnerable workers worry about their work, the old lady dies all alone, the psychopath cannot find a solution. elsewhere, the nurse prefers to come to work with the word “
hospital on strike
” on the back instead of looking after her own baby.
One thing brings them all together: feeling like you are being mistreated, despite not having done anything wrong.
► To read also:
Cannes Film Festival: who will win the Palme d'Or 2021?
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