A sweeping social protest met with utter chaos in an emergency room—especially to the American festival-goer at Cannes, this brief sounds like an unpleasant evocation of 2020. And indeed, filmed in the immediate aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests in France, Catherine Corsini’s “The Divide” (“La fracture”) both reflects the past year and eerily foreshadows the true disaster in emergency rooms that followed the events of the film. Marrying the discord of romantic separation and social unrest, “The Divide” is a tiresome frustration of a film whose advocacy for across-the-aisle bonding rings false and flimsy, even in its most pleasant moments.
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Unlike American protests, in which political affiliations are almost always fairly apparent from the outset, the French gilets jaunes protests attracted fervor from both the far right and the far left. In the streets, flare guns and grenades explode as protestors scatter and riot police attempt to disband crowds; the injured are sent to emergency rooms, which are already overrun with patients. One protestor, Yann (Pio Marmaï), instigates conflict in front of police officers and gets injured in an explosion. He’s treated in the same emergency room where Raf (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Julie (Marina Foïs), a couple in crisis, spend the night. Corsini pairs the environmental stressors with the intimate, personal ones, as Raf and Julie bicker about their relationship as the chaos outside grows louder.
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Corsini balances two rather unwieldy conflicts in “The Divide,” the one between Raf and Julie and the other between Raf and Yann, who strike up a series of shouting matches about Macron in the already-disordered emergency room. Yelling of all kinds dominates this film, and it’s as tiresome as you might imagine; the effort is mostly spearheaded by Bruni-Tedeschi, whose shouting ranges from self-pitying wailing for Julie to care for her to general, drug-induced disorderliness. She’s occasionally funny, as in a scene where she and Yann take it upon themselves to help a woman through labor, but these moments are too few and far between to warrant so many other unproductive sessions of caterwauling. Raf, who finds herself in the emergency room because of a broken arm sustained in a fall, is like a petulant child; when her needs aren’t instantly met, she throws a tantrum.
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Yann is almost equally temperamental, though at least he has a righteous cause. A truck driver campaigning against Macron, he hobbles around the ER searching for a friend who got separated in the chaos of the protest. It’s a noble enough cause, but Yann’s execution is puerile and equally grating as his ideological opponent. Yann and Raf spend long stretches of the film in shouting matches, which Corsini resolves a bit too neatly in a bipartisan bonding session toward the film’s conclusion. That’s not really a spoiler; that Yann and Raf would reach across the aisle and form even a provisional relationship was somewhat of a given from the outset.
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What’s more, it’s hard to care about Yann or Raf’s problems when the casualties of the police response to the protest are so intense, and it feels like a strange false equivalence for Corsini to pair these two, as if putting them on the same level of importance. That’s not really true, of course—intense interpersonal problems can coexist with, and feel as important as, big environmental ones—but perhaps these characters feel so caricaturish and inconsequential that their problems do, too. Corsini doesn’t quite offer us enough about Raf or Yann, from desires to inner feelings beyond basic wants, for us to take their problems seriously. As a result, their arguments feel childish in the context of, well, people struggling to breathe from tear gas on the streets.
Perhaps the only character whom Corsini offers a modicum of humanity is poor Kim (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, a real-life health care worker), who meets her sixth shift in the ER with infinite sympathy and professionalism, even when one of the patients takes her hostage with a pair of scissors. It’s Kim who nobly continues to perform CPR on a patient with heart failure, even when her own infant is in the same hospital with a persistent fever. And it’s also Kim who closes out the film, tearfully watching one of the central characters wheeled away in a gurney with an unlikely chance of survival. But intentional or otherwise, it feels either overwrought or tone-deaf to place the brunt of the emotional burden on the shoulders of a lone Black nurse, especially while the white patrons of the hospital throw such hissy fits around her and complicate her job. In this strange carnivalesque blend of seriousness and inconsequentiality, Corsini loses her message, and her audience. [C]
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