The Fracture by Catherine Corsini divides (review)
The film with Marina Foïs and Pio Marmaï was not unanimously approved by the editorial staff. Great social film tinged with comedy or bloated project? Clear opinions.
Discovered in Cannes in 2021, The divide will be broadcast this evening on France 3. On the Croisette, this film about angry France divided the editorial staff. Here are our opinions for/against.
A night after the Yellow Vests demonstration. A hospital. A designer (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) who broke her arm in the hope of holding back her partner (Marina Foïs). A truck driver (Pio Marmaï) who, seriously injured by CRS during the demonstration, must find a way to leave this hostel to return to his truck or risk losing his job. Their stress, their boundless energy, the inevitable confrontation of these two big mouths in France from above versus France from below mode… The night is going to be long.
For
The state of disrepair of the French hospital system and the Yellow Vest crisis. By embracing these two themes, the new Catherine Corsini is fully in line with a major trend of the 2021 festival: subject films. It remained to be seen how she was going to handle it. By focusing everything on the subject and taking care that nothing goes beyond as in Lingui ? Or by smashing it in all directions even if it means ruffling the hair in certain ways Ahed’s Knee? Spoiler: neither. It’s more at Teverything went well by François Ozon that we can find a sort of cousinship. In this idea of taking human tragedies into farce. Accustomed to a less thunderous cinema (RepetitionLhas beautiful season), Catherine Corsini splits the armor here and it suits her well!
Obviously Corsini films the lack of emergency resources, the dilapidated state of the premises, the unfailing commitment of staff who are too sparse in the face of the Herculean work to be accomplished. But if she only filmed that, The divide would be of little interest. It would only weakly report what so many reports have shown. By putting this designer and this trucker at the center of his film, Corsini deports it. And dare to create laughter and giggles in the middle of the chaos. Like a liberation but also a way of showing that in this place, everyone is at the end of the precipice. Valeria Bruni-Tesdechi offers an interpretation that happily crosses the borderline limits, in a perfectly controlled overdrive. Here again, the gesture is not without risk. Extreme compositions hardly seem to be popular at the 2021 Cannes festival. And yet it works. Is it that The divide tell things we didn’t know? To answer in the affirmative would be to lie. But through his direction of actors and his bias to invite comedy into chaos, Corsini makes us physically feel this After hours which repeats itself evening after evening. The result is not perfect. But it is precisely these inaccuracies, her refusal to remain wisely within the frame that allow Catherine Corsini to create the most exciting film to date.
Thierry Chèze
Against
Is violence (social as well as police) only due to our inability to listen to each other, to hear our individualities and our opinions? Tantalizing central theory of The divide, comedy tinged with social – or social film stuffed with comedy, it’s your choice – in which Catherine Corsini attempts to paint the portrait of a divided France, through bourgeois characters (Marina Foïs and Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) and proles (notably Pio Marmaï in a yellow vest trucker who was hit by a de-encirclement grenade). All these little people meet for one night, in the heart of a bloodless Parisian emergency department, while outside the demonstrators and the police fight it out. So they confront each other, they yell (a lot, about anything and everything) and they are judged in the corridors of a hospital lacking caregivers to treat everyone. A fictitious chaos, artificialized by improbable adventures (a hostage taking! Emergencies gassed by the cops!) and breaks in tone which only too rarely propel the scenario. A few punchlines emerge nonetheless (“ At my age you know what I do to you? I fuck you dry “) of this caricatured closed door which does not keep its promises, very busy contemplating its supposed relevance. Let’s save the casting – Marmaï and Foïs as always do the job perfectly -, including Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi who turns the knob to 11, and of whom we would be unable to say if she crosses the yellow line or if she is authentically brilliant.
François Léger
Marina Foïs and Pio Marmaï: “Filming the collapse is a real challenge!”
