Avis des critiques

Corsini has a reputation for her portraits of female protagonists in various intimate relationship dramas such as Summertime and The New Eve. Here she directs at a breakneck pace and spares none of her political punches as we watch the impossibly burdened health workers trying to clear up the mess of heavy-handed policing and a seemingly uncaring Government.

It’s a film that arrives long after the moment it could have made its greatest impact, its on-the-nose satire losing some of its sting now that the events within define a period that has long since passed. Corsini may use heavy-handed metaphors to show that some wounds are still yet to heal, but The Divide can’t help feeling irrelevant in total—a supposedly urgent black comedy that arrives looking more like a period piece.

The Divide feels like a sophisticated chamber play... Co-writers Corsini, Agnès Feuvre and Laurette Polmanss bring a well executed script; the dialogue is sharp and funny, the sentiment behind it the belief that humour is the spoonful of sugar to sweeten the focus on the bitter medicine of France’s political division.

“La Fracture” may wonder why people remain so divided, but it answers that question over and over again: because most people are goddamn annoying, and that’s long before you get down to any sort of political division... It’s not so much a slice of life as it is a forceful chop, a violent confrontation that will turn off most people long before they can bridge any sort of divide.

Corsini synthesizes both her surveying of pent-up political anger and the oft-invisible diversity of after-effects this anger exerts on most bystanders, especially the silent and vulnerable ones within their midst... ["The Divide"] stands out among its cynically hackneyed ilk: it’s unrelenting, exhausted, but persists as oddly charming in places.

The film can be both entertaining and surprisingly funny, especially if you’re familiar with France’s politics and current economic woes. But it’s also too on-the-nose about what it wants to say, or rather, shout as loud as it can, regarding the country’s accumulated social wreckage — to the point that the movie winds up drowning out its own main ideas.

Marrying the discord of romantic separation and social unrest, “The Divide” is a tiresome frustration of a film whose advocacy for across-the-aisle bonding rings false and flimsy, even in its most pleasant moments.

While it features a highly notable cast, many of whom are performing in ways suggesting they’re each in different films, Corsini’s definitive choices of her metaphorical divide does indeed create a continually jarring effect on the audience as well as her narrative.

Sometimes the transitions between plot lines feel forced or messy, yet this is a minor quibble with a film whose personal and political ambitions are pulled off with a satisfying level of heart.

The problem is that the movie aims to do little more than offer diagnoses of various ailments afflicting France. The characters are in effect caricatures, written as mouthpieces to raise particular issues.

Appraising her country’s various ills with a healthy dose of Gallic gallows humor, the filmmaker has delivered a kind of screwball comedy full of physical gags, rat-a-tat dialogue and intricate choreography that veers towards a weightier third act while offering plenty of belly laughs along the way.

Building on an extremely well constructed script and on a feverish rhythm sketching many micro-stories that bring more grist to the mill of the whole, Catherine Corsini signs a lively and ardent feature film that doesn’t hide its metaphorical intentions. Its message, however, is conveyed with such vigor and a welcome sense of humour (which in no way alters the film’s clinical observation of acute social problems in eruption) that the dramatic pill passes perfectly well