You can practically smell it Black flies a director who smokes behind the camera muttering about spitting in the face of humanity.
Photo: FilmNation Entertainment
This review was originally published on May 19, 2023 by the Cannes Film Festival (at the time the film was titled Black flies). We’re rolling it out in time for its theatrical release.
Starring Tye Sheridan and Sean Penn as a pair of EMTs who fight their way through an endless gauntlet of violence, brutality and gore, Asphalt is the kind of movie that could fuel a year’s worth of wet dreams for any politician willing to paint New York as a crime-ridden hellscape. But the film, directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, doesn’t try all that hard to be realistic, as evidenced by its stylized passages featuring flashing, kaleidoscopic sirens, germinal screams and stirring Wagnerian overtures. The film is dark and depressing even by Cannes standards, but it has enough of an art film vibe to make it perfect for Cannes as well. You can practically smell the director smoking behind the camera, muttering about spitting in the face of humanity.
Based on a 2008 novel by Shannon Burke, Asphalt has a pretty familiar setup. Wide-eyed rookie Ollie Cross (Sheridan), a young, ambitious doctor eager to gain real-world experience while studying for the MCATs, is paired with the obnoxious and perpetually nervous Rutkowski (Penn), who’s hard at work but right. him so long that he feels nothing for those he is supposed to save. They both have a past, sort of. Ollie has flashbacks of his mother’s suicide and his inability to help her. Now he’s repentant, like some Paul Schrader character living in a tiny room in a cramped apartment in Chinatown. “That’s how it starts for a lot of guys,” Rutkowski notes, “when they see someone they love take their last breath.” He’s long past that stage himself. He’s lost count of his ex-wives (his last is played by Katherine Waterston) and defies the horrors of existence by telling dirty jokes and fantasizing about opening doors for cyclists. Rutkowski isn’t a particularly well-defined character—he’s mostly just a set of attitudes—but Penn brings a kind of bittersweet charm to the role. Few actors are so convincing that they are generally angry at the world.
Despite the repetitive, episodic structure, Asphalt it’s never boring. Sauver films each encounter as a vision of hell. The gang members are bleeding. Drug addicts passed out on laundromat floors. The abused wives being yelled at by their crappy husbands. Purple babies born to dying mothers. Dogs shot for no reason (and then used as props for horrific practical jokes by EMTs). The film wants to rub our faces in blood and grime, to traumatize us, and on that level it often succeeds. But sometimes it’s also ridiculous. As Ollie and Rutkowski intubate a 63-year-old meat processing worker who can’t breathe, the director, apparently worried he’s been too tasty so far, cuts to footage of lambs being slaughtered.
Burke’s novel, which I have not read, was praised for its terrifying authenticity; the author spent five years working as an emergency physician and based much of this on his real-life experiences. The film, by contrast, feels purposefully stylized. There are nods to Terrence Malick throughout: he’s grateful in the credits, Wagner’s lines are the same from The new worldand Sheridan and Penn represent a Tree of Life gathering. It makes for a strange starting point for this kind of material: Malick’s cinema is anything but compassionate, while Asphalt is mired in the misery of her environment. Locked in the perspective of its characters, the film denies the humanity of the people around these emergency teams. They have no names and almost no faces. They are just body parts and screams.
Obviously, EMTs are called for emergencies; they don’t call them for birthdays. But as these white emergency responders make their way through these unrelenting horrors, Sauver unsettles us with the sheer anonymity of the faces around them, mostly people of color and immigrants. It’s hard to watch and even harder to accept. We get the sense that this is a structural gambit designed to pay off later, when our heroes are sure to face the fact that these people are, in fact, human. That’s exactly what happens, but when the moment comes, it feels oddly superficial. So much so that one can’t help but feel that the director’s real interests lie elsewhere, back in the intense, blood-soaked spectacles of depravity and pain. There’s style and skills you can add Asphaltbut the film also feels like a victim of the very numbness and emotional emptiness it seeks to expose.
See all
