The mounting anxiety experienced by the protagonist of Petra Biondina Volpe’s Late Shift — Floria, a nurse on a badly understaffed surgical ward — hardly strikes one as particularly cinematic. Trauma and tragedy, a cast of colorful characters, and a literally unrelenting stream of life-or-death situations — all appear, on paper, to be precisely the stuff of gripping cinema. Yet, as any hospital worker will surely know too well, this is wholly quotidian, the stuff of just another shift. Credit, then, to Volpe, who merges the quotidian with the cinematic and makes something genuinely gripping, even if she strains a little in her efforts.
The scenario is simple: we follow Floria (Leonie Benesch) on a late-afternoon shift, attending patients on a hospital ward, from clocking in to clocking out. Conceptually, Volpe doesn’t try to mitigate this simplicity, though there’s considerable complexity in pulling this off. Astute editing by Hansjörg Weißbrich seamlessly elides the in-between moments, making it feel as though we’ve covered everything and missed nothing of Floria’s shift, despite the movie lasting a mere 90 minutes. Volpe knows when to linger and when to leave, honing in on mundane tasks performed under pressure with a patient intensity that permits tension to develop insidiously. Long tracking shots — too often a distancing display of bravura in modern film and TV, a counter-productive shortcut to would-be immersion — are used intelligently, moving with Floria, or even with the equipment she steers down corridors and around beds; then, where appropriate, they’re abandoned for conventional setups with conventional cuts.
Volpe is sensitive to the demands of each moment, and never lets her technique overshadow her story; rather, they are united, informing each other harmoniously. Ultimately, cinema is a medium of fakery: fake characters, fake stories, fake sets. Attempts at manufacturing verisimilitude rarely succeed unless the manufacture itself is acknowledged and properly manipulated. Volpe succeeds here by understanding what the audience needs to experience immersion, rejecting technical dogmatism and varying her approach to time and pacing, camera setup, and story structure in order to maximize viewer investment… until she indulges a little too much in melodrama. A purely average, relatively uneventful shift might not have made for a great movie, so it’s appropriate that this specific shift would be a touch more dramatic. But it’s more than a touch, with too many improbable emotional beats, a clunky character arc for one particular patient that’s resolved in a matter of mere minutes, and a final, slightly jarring turn toward magical realism. Watching Floria accomplish one trying task after another, speeding between rooms and medicine cabinets with furious concentration, is compelling enough. Watching her shed a single tear at the death of a terminally ill woman feels like a concession to soap opera dramatics that this movie really doesn’t need.
Holding Late Shift together, though, no matter the strength nor shakiness of Volpe’s conceit, is Benesch. The kind of performer you’d too rarely see in English-language cinema, she builds her characters from the inside out, finding a relatable, unremarkably human core to a woman one might expect to be just this unremarkable in real life, despite the remarkable work she undertakes every day. There’s such intelligence in Benesch’s refusal to let her skill as an actor become the focus, instead holding that focus on the character and her work (the practice that must have gone into performing Floria’s many different duties at speed and in long takes is extremely impressive) — this intelligence chimes nicely with Volpe’s approach at first, then elevates the mistakes in her approach toward the end.
Still, despite its intensity, and the sporadic displays of high emotion, this is a low-key movie at heart, lacking in scope and scale in a way that feels appropriate for its concept. It’s at its best when Volpe embraces this understated nature, surrendering to the merits of telling a simple story with conviction and compassion; conversely, it’s at its worst when Volpe insists on pushing too far from the verisimilitude she establishes so well in its early stages. For a portrait of professional mundanity, it never feels more mundane than in its attempts to overcome said mundanity. But the conviction and compassion shine through regardless.
DIRECTOR: Petra Biondina Volpe; CAST: Leonie Benesch, Alireza Bayram, Jürg Plüss, Jasmin Mattei; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN THEATERS: March 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
Comments are closed.