Black Flies is directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire. The film follows a young paramedic named Ollie Cross, who is partnered with experienced medic Rutkovsky, who thrusts him into the harsh realities of New York’s inner-city streets. Amidst high crime rates, homelessness, and widespread drug use, Ollie finds his perspective on life and death beginning to shift.
As somebody who enjoyed this film much more than the average Cannes-goer, I feel obligated to make my partial defense of the film known.
This film, in premise and execution, is very similar to thrillers like Nightcrawler or Training Day. Tye Sheridan’s “Cross” character is the archetypal representation of innocence and good heartedness. Almost immediately, it becomes painfully obvious that this innocence will be pushed to the limit, as Cross is immediately thrusted into a stressful and intense situation, where his inexperience hinders his ability to apply medical aid to a gunshot victim amidst a hectic and chaotic frenzy. Luckily, he is aided by Rutkovsky, played by Sean Penn. Rutkovsky (AKA “Rut”) will go on to shepherd Cross throughout the film, and as their relationship fleshes out during long ride alongs and stressful medical emergencies, their dynamic becomes somewhat reminiscent of Washington and Hawke’s characters in Training Day.
Sauvaire’s affinity for truly grimy settings and disturbing, squirm-inducing aesthetics is on full display here, even more than in his previous film, A Prayer Before Dawn. It is perhaps his greatest strength. Cross and “Rut” spend the majority of the film encountering increasingly grotesque and gory problems among the grimy streets of New York, including dead dogs, decaying bodies, and a truly horrifying sequence involving childbirth gone wrong. The first half of the film is a revolving door of different medical emergencies, one after the other, which can feel a bit repetitive, but is effective at immersing the viewer into the dramatized life of a New York paramedic. Some people will undoubtedly be put off by the extent to which this film depicts the disgusting and painful injuries of the paramedics’ patients, but these images become vital to the understanding of Cross’ disillusionment and perturbation.
If it isn’t clear already, this would probably not be the best film for a date night.
The editing of this film is fantastic, and efficiently demonstrates the headspace of the protagonist through its use of transition. Borders become increasingly blurred, the passage of time becomes incomprehensible, and the it becomes almost impossible to differentiate reality from paranoid hallucination. The constant flashing of lights, wailing of sirens, and chaos of New York streets create a maddening cacophony that further motivates this spiral into darkness.
In retrospect, the gruesome tour of paramedic work that dominates the first half of this film can feel a bit wasteful in the way it refuses to utilize scenes to develop its characters, particularly Rut. This abundance of intense situations Rut encounters should present plenty of chances to build/tear down the foundation his character, piece by piece, but instead, his character feels consistent in his convictions until suddenly and abruptly he is not. Later in the film, when Rut’s perspective on life, death, and his belief in his agency over the two becomes clear, it feels like it comes somewhat out of left field, because his actions in the first half of the film don’t always reflect the worldview that we come to see he has. Still, his perspective is compelling and representative of many of the films themes about the danger that comes when people in power indulge in judgement.
Tye Sheridan’s performance is a standout in this film. The film is almost singularly focused around the maddening descent of his character, and Sheridan sells it very will, with exception to one scene late in the film, where Sheridan’s frenzied screams felt more like a winey temper tantrum than a crazed outburst, and I actually caught some people in my theater snickering at it. The film also casts Mike Tyson as the paramedics’ boss, and while this is a cool flare to attract attention to the movie, Tyson is ultimately a distraction in all of the scenes he is in, even if his performance is actually pretty good. His character is also written inconsistently, which of course is not Tyson’s fault. He is introduced as someone who looks past a heinous and certainly illegal threat that is levied in his very own paramedics locker room, but his sole purpose throughout the remainder of the film is to hold the paramedics accountable for their breaches in procedure and protocol.
A big point of contention in this film is the use of Katherine Waterson’s “Nancy” character. Nancy is introduced to Cross in a nightclub, and the two enter what seems like a casual, purely sexual relationship. Other than her first scene in the nightclub, Nancy remains unclothed in every scene until the last few minutes of the film. Her only function is purely to have sex with Cross after whatever disturbing pandemonium he just returned from. The intention of this seems to be the juxtaposition of the decaying, bloody, cold bodies Cross spends his days with compared to Nancy’s sensual, warm, angelic nakedness. The argument is that this film simply objectifies Nancy as an object of sexual desire, and I believe that was Sauvaire’s complete intention. The fact that the film completely refuses to show us scenes of their relationship outside of the bedroom, in my opinion, is a demonstration of Cross’ perspective of her. Perhaps this would’ve been done more tastefully if their relationship was shown more at first, and then gradually declined into one of a purely sexual nature as Cross became more and more disturbed, but then again, Cross only meets her after his insanity has begun to take hold. Perhaps Sauvaire could have been less gratuitous with the explicitness of these sex scenes, but then again, he is equally as gratuitous with gore on the other side of the spectrum, if not more so. I believe Nancy’s portrayal is intentionally relegated to objectification in an effort to reveal more about Cross, and thus, the depiction of her character is supposed to be off-putting to viewers.
The film leans heavily into religious imagery. A little too heavily, in fact. Personally, I am a huge fan of religious symbolism in film. It is a mechanism that has been used in storytelling for thousands of years, and often times makes a story’s themes and archetypes a little more universal and resonant. Not to mention the fact that is simply fun as a viewer to recognize callbacks to legends of old that you may be familiar with. Sauvaire, however, does not allow the viewer to revel in that sense of accomplishment. Instead of pitching the viewer the ball and allowing them to take a swing at it, he walks up, puts the ball on a tee, and then swings the bat for them. Let me explain: Cross has a picture of the archangel Raphael hanging in his bedroom. Instead of lingering on this picture once and trusting the viewer to make the connection, Sauvaire shows the picture an incessant amount of times, to the point it begins to induce eye rolls. To add onto this, when Cross isn’t wearing his paramedic uniform, he is always wearing a bomber jacket that has literal angel wings woven into the fabric on the back (which is perhaps a callback to the Ryan Gosling’s famous costume in Drive). The consequence of this repetition is made abundantly clear later in the film, when Michael Pitt’s character utters a line about having the power of a god when in control of a dying patient in the ambulance. Any semblance of poignance this line may have originally held is washed away by the film’s heavy handedness and replaced with the bitter taste of annoyance. What could’ve been a clever motif that accentuates the themes of the film instead becomes another weight bearing down on this film.
Despite these shortcomings, the dark thrills of Black Flies keep the film entertaining and engaging throughout. The film is at its best when the bullet holes, collapsing lungs, and putrid smell of rigor mortis forces the viewer to confront their mortality and the line between disturbing and heroic efforts to govern that mortality. The madness of the film is mostly intoxicating and penetrating to the core. For those who may not appreciate this extremely cynical depiction of paramedics, Black Flies’ ending brings the audience’s attention back to the nobility and heroism of which most real-life paramedics are shining patrons. Black Flies is frustrating, not only because its mistakes are so glaringly obvious and easily remedied, but because the film is still great in spite of them, meaning that with a little more care, this film could’ve found a vivacious pulse and avoided the slow death it is now sure to suffer at Cannes.
Written by Michael Saccone
awesome