The Divide [La Fracture] (Catherine Corsini, 2021) (Patreon)

As incongruous as it may seen, I found myself thinking about the recent films of Adam McKay while watching La Fracture, the latest film from Catherine Corsini. Needless to say, it wasn't a flattering comparison. Like the liberal idiocy found in the likes of The Big Short and Vice (I could never bring myself to watch Don't Look Up), Le Fracture thinks the worst of its audience. There are didactic political intentions in these films, but their makers believe they have to make the medicine go down with hacky, sub-sitcom maneuvering and over-the-top celebrity mugging. Never mind the fact that these directors overestimate the potency of their "medicine" to begin with.

So yeah, Corsini wanted to make a film about the yellow-vest protests in France, and by extension, the overworked, underfunded national health service that served as the flashpoint for those protests. But she thinks she has to trick her bourgeois viewers into going to see such a film, so she packages Le Fracture as a tiresome bourgeois comedy, based on the dissolution of a marriage between two incredibly irritating women. Raffaela (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is a cartoonist who is pleading with her wife Julie (Marina Foïs) not to leave her. Raf is a self-absorbed narcissist; Julie is an emotionally unavailable ice queen. And their regularly scheduled breakup is preempted when Raf trips in the street and breaks her elbow.

This sends both women to the hospital, which is even more short-staffed and overtaxed than normal because the police have started beating the shit out of the protesters. They are metonymically represented by Yann (Pio Marmaï, quite good), a working class truck driver whose leg is riddled with shrapnel. He is repeatedly placed in close proximity to Raf in the emergency ward, and the two of them debate the logic of the protests, the policies of Macron and Le Pen, and the general ignorance that each social class has about the other. (Like much of Corsini's film, the title doesn't really translate. Le Fracture is both Raf's literal fracture, and the schism or divide between classes.)

The back half of Le Fracture is considerably better than its set-up, since it starts focusing on the hospital staff, in particular Kim (non-professional actress Aissatou Diallo Sagna, a real medical worker), who is on duty for the sixth day in a row, a legal violation. Corsini zips around, following the plights of various ER patients, the growing throng in the waiting room, and the mounting police violence that is edging closer and closer to the hospital. A better director would have just started with this relatively solid medical drama. Sure, a Dardennes approach would be best, but even a populist entertainer like Ladj Ly would have served the material better. As it stands, La Fracture is insulting and smug, exactly the sort of liberal-establishment communiqué that would get a thumbs-up from Macron himself.