La Fracture (2021, Catherine Corsini) (Patreon)

41/100

You are too much for me, Cannes Competition completism. You son of a whore sumbitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.

Anyway, still working through the dregs of 2021's lineup (one more to go), and what I learned from La Fracture—since it hasn't opened in the U.S., I feel no obligation to call it The Divide, a bizarrely poor translation of a title that doesn't even require one—is that Corsini apparently has no close friends. Not in the film industry, anyway. Because if she did, surely one of them would have heard her pitch, which boils down to "A woman badly fractures her elbow, and at the same time her marriage of many years has fractured, and also at the same time French society itself is violently fracturing due to the yellow-vests protests, with all of these modes of fracture colliding in a busy emergency room," and gently informed her that she had come up with a grandiose-yet-intimate concept that's overly schematic and frankly kinda dumb. Hardest to endure early on, mostly because Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi plays the injured woman as an insufferable need demon (we're clearly meant to find her annoying, but still), and the film doesn't improve upon introducing a belligerent wounded yellow vest with whom she can engage in spirited political bickering, uselessly focused on who did or didn't vote for Macron. Second half turns into a sweeps-week ER episode, with one nurse (played by a real-life caregiver who gives far and away the film's best performance) first seeing her own child brought in sick while she's in the middle of giving a coding patient chest compressions and then being taken hostage at scissor-point by a psychotic who's gone off his meds; this overwrought nonsense at least offers a charge of excitement, plus pushes Bruni-Tedeschi's histrionics into the background for a while. The movie soon reverts to tendentious form, though, and it ends, as every third art film of late seemingly must because nobody can fucking think of anything else, with a character suddenly looking directly into the camera lens, cut to black, roll credits. STOP IT.