Never one to shy away from jacked-up displays of testosterone, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire continues his punishing display of male violence in Black Flies, a loud, pulsing evocation of Emergency Medical Technicians working Brooklyn’s most unrelentingly mean streets. Based on a novel by Shannon Burke that dug deep into a world where ambulance workers become either mad dogs or empty casings, Sauvaire aims to match the book’s harrowing descriptions of death’s stench with pounding scenes of rage accompanied by flashing lights, cacophonous sounds and handheld camerawork. Lacking the mesmeric surface beauty of Johnny Mad Dog and ultimately more formulaic than A Prayer Before Dawn, the director’s third feature has multiple problems, not least its treatment of New York’s immigrant communities and complete lack of interest in the sketchy female characters. Sauvaire’s inauspicious Cannes competition debut is unlikely to get box offices buzzing.
Citing The French Connection as a major inspiration, the director shot in some of the same locations, wanting to pretend the clock remains stuck in 1971 even though the film is designed as a contemporary take on NYC as an unending war zone. Even more curious is Sauvaire’s belief, expressed in press notes, that he’s made a hard-hitting statement about the dire state of the U.S. health care system; nothing in the film warrants such a reading since its far more interested in the impact of soul-crushing violence perpetrated by tattooed, expletive-spouting immigrants than any engagement with health care inequities.
Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan) is a baby-faced novice from Colorado who’s joined an EMT squad working East New York and Brownsville while he studies to re-take his MCAT. When first introduced, he’s with hardened coworkers in the back of an ambulance trying to focus before entering a screaming melee of tatted black gang members in order to extricate a guy whose been shot up bad. No one wants a hesitant newbie around, but his partner Gene Rutkovksy (Sean Penn), known as Rut, has a stabilizing influence even though the patient (with “Sorry” and “Mom” tattooed above his eyelids) flatlines before they get to the hospital.
Every call throws them into dangerous territory, whether from Latino gangs or abusive addicts, and Cross’ newbie status subjects him to further taunting from hard-bitten fellow EMT workers like borderline psycho Lafontaine (Michael C. Pitt, a man who certainly knows demons). To say that Mike Tyson, playing squad chief Burroughs, is the most balanced figure in the film is quite a statement. Unsurprisingly, Rut’s veneer of calm professionalism can’t completely disguise his 9/11 trauma, which also presumably explains why he’s gone through several wives.
Not that Cross’ past is trauma free: his mother slit her wrists in the bathtub when he was young and he watched her die. That might explain why he’s studying to save lives, but it doesn’t clarify why he’s living in a decrepit communal apartment in Chinatown, and few viewers will really buy the explanation that this is all he can afford. The only genuine human contact he has is a sexual relationship with single mom Clara (Raquel Nave), though her tattoos have more character than the script grants the woman herself.
As expected, Cross becomes increasingly edgy surrounded by an unrelenting barrage of sensory overload, until tensions burst out like exploding innards when he and Rut are called to a rehab facility where an HIV+ former heroin addict is found zonked out in a pool of blood with her presumably dead fetus still attached to the umbilical cord. The moral ramifications of deciding who to save and who to let die ultimately send Cross and Rut off to their different fates, leading to platitudinous lines like “We all live in the darkness, you don’t need to let it inside ya.” Perhaps the producers decided it needed some sense of redemption, because towards the end there’s a rescue scene that could have been taken from anodyne EMT shows like 911.
Sauvaire pushes visual parallels between Cross and angels, both with angel wings on the back of his jacket and an image of the Archangel Michael that forms the only decoration on his heavily distressed walls (end credits even include the Archangel Michael among the thank yous). It feels both false and forced, like so much of the film, though at least not offensive like the treatment of immigrants, largely hyper-violent, barely intelligible thugs or “othered” like halal butcher employees (why flash scenes of lamb carcasses being gutted?) and literally all of Chinatown. Women are drunken foul-mouthed whores apart from Carla and Rut’s ex Nancy (Katherine Waterston), though the former is merely an avatar for carnality and the latter, briefly seen, simply flinty from being wounded and therefore unfaithful. It’s true her infidelity was in response to Rut’s own chronic womanizing, but hers is the catalyst to his downfall.
Within this pressure cooker of a movie it’s remarkable that Sean Penn manages to be the calm eye of the storm, looking like he earned every crease on his finely-lined face. Tye Sheridan, also producing, is fine but the script and his character’s trajectory are so utterly predictable that nothing feels surprising. Both Johnny Mad Dog and, to a lesser extent, A Prayer Before Dawn had a captivating filmic beauty lacking in Black Flies, whose visual DNA is enervating adrenaline mixed with fetid dread. Sauvaire is promising to continue mining his obsession with male aggression, but until he comes up with some salutary statement on how to counter its toxic impact, his films will remain slick surface treatments serving up violence for violence’s sake.
Director: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Screenplay: Ryan King, Ben MacBrown, based on the novel by Shannon Burke
Cast: Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Gbenga Akkinagbe, Raquel Nave, Kali Reis, Michael C. Pitt, Katherine Waterston, Mike Tyson, Onie Maceo Watlington, Kareemah Odeh.
Producers: Tye Sheridan, Tina Wang, Sean Penn, John Ira Palmer, John Wildermuth, Christopher Kopp, Lucan Toh, Warren Goz, Eric Gold
Executive producers: Shannon Burke, Babak Anvari, Ryan King, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, Jamie Buckner, Luke Rodgers, James Masciello, Matthew Sidari, Mitchell Zhang
Co-producer: Trevor Osmond
Cinematography: David Ungaro
Production designer: Robert Pyzocha
Costume designer: Stacy Jansen
Editing: Saar Klein, Katherine McQuerrey
Music: Nicolas Becker, Quentin Sirjacq
Sound: Ken Yasumoto
Production companies: Sculptor Media (USA), in association with Projected Pictures, Aza Films, Two & Two Pictures, Dogwood Pictures
World sales: FilmNation Entertainment
Venue: Cannes (Competition)
In English
124 minutes
