Enlarge image
Truck driver Yann (Pio Marmai) was injured in a yellow vest demonstration.
Now he's waiting in the emergency room.
Photo: Cannes Film Festival
"Leave me alone with your guilty feelings for having chosen Macron!" The dispute over the French presidential elections in 2017 does not stop in the emergency room. Truck driver Yann (Pio Marmai) lies with a calf full of shrapnel next to illustrator Raphaela (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who has broken her arm. He was at a yellow vest demonstration on the Champs-Élysées against the policies of Emmanuel Macron, she ran after her friend and slipped.
Political and private clashes incessantly in Catherine Corsini's breathless drama "La Fracture" - even in the title: The break can refer to Raphaela's injury as well as to social division. The political and the private are not reconciled in this surprise film in the Cannes competition, only brought together, and even that only succeeds in a place where a state of emergency is the rule: in the emergency room.
The pandemic appears to have slowed down and dampened a lot, including at the Cannes Film Festival.
There is hardly any crowding on the red carpet, and the reactions to the films are friendly to cautious.
Perhaps the festival is a larger-scale test, carried out secretly on a few thousand film enthusiasts: After a year and a half of the prescribed retreat into private life, are we ready again for the real confrontation, the immediate argument, the unfiltered feelings?
What about the far right?
After »La Fracture« one feels better prepared for it in any case. Like a reboot for society as a whole, the film begins at a point in time when the debates had not yet completely migrated to the internet, but were raging on the street. The yellow vests dominated the news not only in France at the turn of 2018/19. In some cases over a quarter of a million demonstrators are storming against President Macron, who they accuse of a policy only for the wealthy.
The “gilets jaunes” are quickly blamed for the fact that right-wing extremists march along, and director Corsini also makes the accusation. She doesn't dissolve it, neither can her snapshot from a night full of violence and pain. Like the nurses and doctors in their emergency room, Corsini, who was invited to the competition for the first time at the age of 65, is concerned with recording the most urgent injuries and their provisional treatment.
One of these injuries is the nursing emergency, which seems as acute in France as it is in Germany: Sister Kim (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) is officially allowed to work three night shifts a week, but this is her sixth in a row.
Kim and her colleagues would also like to demonstrate, but who else is supposed to look after the sick?
A patch on the smock "On strike" has to be enough.
Then it starts with a twelve-hour shift.
At the beginning of the demo, the first wounded arrive, where the police proceed with batons and rubber bullets.
In the end, the tear gas of the advanced police even penetrated the waiting room of the emergency room.
Electricity surge remains electric surge
High-pressure cinema, as Corsini succeeds with "La fracture", has a small tradition in France.
Mathieu Kassovitz shaped it with “The Hate” in the nineties, most recently Stéphane Brizé continued it with “Strike” and Ladj Ly with “The Angry”.
Unfortunately, none of the energy exuded by these films seems to have reached German filmmakers.
After »La fracture« one wonders why such films have not been around for a long time about the riots and police violence during the G20 in Hamburg.
Why doesn't German cinema trust this urgency?
Why doesn't it take up the challenge of being tentative and aloof?
Maybe you don't want to be able to argue about your films?
Cannes provides good arguments this year to dare more of this type of cinema, because another highlight of the competition so far is another, similarly angry film: "Ahned's Knee" by Nadav Lapid.
The Israeli won the Berlinale in 2019 with »Synonymes«, and the next film was finished less than 18 months later.
He works through Lapid's experiences with the Israeli cultural authorities, who send him a list of topics that he is officially allowed to talk about before one of his films is screened.
Of course not there: the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
In Lapid's place, Avshalom Pollak now frees filmmaker Y due to such absurd conditions and almost drives himself and his hostess crazy on the edge of a screening in the Arava desert.
Written in just two weeks and shot in 18 days, "Ahned's Knee" is the opposite of the films that directors normally attach to winning big prizes: dignified celebrity cinema, in English for the largest possible audience. Corona prevented an equally quick theatrical release, but »Ahned's Knee« has lost none of its intensity despite the waiting time. Electric shock remains electric shock, no matter when it hits you. The film should also start in Germany at the beginning of next year.