The first crack appears at the very beginning of Catherine Corsini’s In the Best Hands: a passive-aggressive flurry of text messages in the middle of the night, even though Raf (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and Julie (Marina Foïs) are in bed next to each other. The next morning the house blessing is crooked again, this time seemingly beyond repair. The relationship dynamics of the two women are poisoned, Julie’s son Eliott (Ferdinand Perez) has gotten used to the disputes at the breakfast table. The teenager is skipping school this morning, he wants to go to the yellow vest protests that escalated in France in spring 2019. Annoyed, his mother storms out of the house.
The break that Corsini’s comedy tells about in the original French title “La fracture” then happens quite literally. As Raf guiltily tries to run after her partner, she trips and breaks her arm, unbeknownst to Julie. She ends up in the emergency room, where they are preparing for a heavy shift. The emergency room is understaffed and the first demo victims are already being brought in, including truck driver Yann (Pio Marmaï), who has traveled hundreds of kilometers to express his displeasure with Emmanuel Macron’s policies. Meanwhile, the nurses are discussing the order from above to hand over the names of the injured to the police.
In times of democratically empowered populists, rifts that run through families and society have become a dictum. The French director Catherine Corsini has found an obvious genre for the political turmoil: the workplace comedy that depicts big life on a small scale.
When “In the Best Hands” was screened in the Cannes competition last year, the yellow vest protests, which originally went back to the increase in the petrol tax, were almost historic again; the Corona measures had continued the social ruptures. Now, between an economic boycott against Russia and presidential elections, Corsini’s film is astonishingly topical again.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays an annoying patient
The fact that “In the best hands” works so well as a contemporary image and social drama is also due to the circumstances. Its qualities as a screwball comedy, however, are a credit to Corsini, who wrote the screenplay with Agnès Feuvre and Laurette Polmanss. And, not to forget, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who is highly dramatic as an emergency patient from hell, constantly in need of care and blind to the seriously injured people around her – for which she is pushed from one waiting room to the next as punishment by the staff.
“What do you want at the demonstrations?” Raf asked Eliot in the morning. “They all vote for Le Pen.” The people who arrive at the emergency room shortly afterwards represent a broad cross-section of French society. “Are you crazy, why should I vote for Le Pen?” Yann Raf snaps. who messes with everyone in her painkiller delirium. For him, the comic artist embodies what is going wrong for the working class in France: the liberals are resting on the laurels of the achievements of the past, but the times of Mitterand no longer have anything to do with Macron’s neoliberal policies.
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In the hospital, the social discrepancy becomes obvious. Nurse Kim (Aissatou Diallo Sagna) is working the sixth shift in a row, even though she has a sick child at home. Badly paid, understaffed: she wants to quit. Now she just has to survive this service. The police are already waiting in front of the barricaded door to arrest the injured protesters.
(In nine Berlin cinemas, also original subtitles)
“In the Best Hands” is social criticism á la Ken Loach in the best sense of the word, but rarely runs the risk of taking refuge in sentimentality – as has been common in recent French comedy. And if the dialogue occasionally offers socially critical punches, Corsini and her co-authors ensure that the verbal battles between Bruni Tedeschi, Foïs and Marmaï sweep away any hint of social pathos. “In the Best Hands” shifts the tone again and again cleverly between the genres: social drama, comedy, western, with the cavalry at the gates. The social positions that meet in the emergency room are badly shortened, but since Corsini remains true to the form of the workplace comedy, the sitcom setting takes on an almost documentary character.
So the character of Kim eventually becomes the main protagonist. Aissatou Diallo Sagna works as a nurse; more than just a stunt casting. Corsini shows in detail the work of the nursing staff in a state of siege, the handles in the emergency room are as important as the punch lines in the script. And Diallo Sagna surpasses herself in her role. Two summers ago, people stood on the balconies and applauded. “In the best of hands” is now a cinematic homage to the nurses, so to speak.
