Anyone who has ever been to New York is familiar with the city's incessant ambulance sirens, which break up the night with their shrill cry. Adapted from Shannon Burke's novel 911, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire 's Black Flies is in official competition at the Cannes 2023 Film Festival.
Behind the wheel, two paramedics, the taciturn Rutkovsky(Sean Penn), all cracks and fissures, toothpick stuck in his beak, and rookie Ollie Cross(Tye Sheridan, impeccable), for whom the stint with the paramedics is just a stepping stone to medical school.
Partners in this furiousbuddy movie (one affected by the sight of a corpse, the other weary, even disgusted by his job), they crisscross Brooklyn at breakneck speed, an obvious Scorsese reference, in a trashy, stylized version, but without ever reaching the model.
First scene, outside at night, immediate impact. A raw, immersive dive into the guts of the city that never sleeps, with blood, sweat and tears, Chief. Tight framing, erratic editing and a camera that races behind the paramedics, follows the stretchers, dives as close as possible to the bullet wounds; and even some real flashes of brilliance, in the Safdie brothers' way of taking the pulse of New York in the midst of a tachycardia attack.
With violence and insecurity once again plaguing the Big Apple since City Hall abandoned its zero-tolerance policy, the film highlights the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, those who benefit from the metropolis and those who suffer. But it's a slightly distorting, miserabilistic mirror held up by the French director, who himself has been uprooted in New York for years, stumbling over clichés as his interventions become repetitive over time.
Hostile Mexican gangs or ritualistic Muslims, senile old men or religious Indians, drug addicts or alcoholics - the tattoos are a sign of recognition; it's they who must be atoned for by these saviors for their immorality and extracted from the filth of violence-ridden neighborhoods.
It's a reality, to be sure, and one that allows for some striking and gripping scenes (the bathtub scene). But the only Caucasian to call for help, a Slav, threatens his wife in his native tongue, and the unsubtitled exchange again marks the distance between these two mutually subjugated worlds. A shapeless mass of minorities and disenfranchised people, portrayed as drugged-up, dirty and shouting; a social misery that becomes moral, and reaches Sean Penn, a decision-maker god if not a redeemer, to the point of fault.
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