Urgences (OmeU)

Filmed in the psychiatric ward of the Hôtel-Dieu, a large hospital in Paris. The patients arrive on their own, or with considerable help from the police, but all of them are in need of medical attention. We witness different situations depicting the relationship between doctor and patient. A bus driver explains the reasons for his nervous breakdown; a woman, that swallowed barbiturates, gets her stomach pumped; an alcoholic argues with the staff; a 65 year old man who tried to commit suicide, asks the doctor to kill him. Depardon knows where to position his camera. He never interferes, does not analyze, observes calmly the scene. Just like the main idea of his cinematic approach. “The twenty sequences do not only interpellate viewers into the alienations and deceits of intake interview situations with psychotherapists and those suffering from everything from dereliction to psychosis, but also, as the French philosopher Félix Guattari believes, ‘the spectacle of these existential ruptures works directly upon our own lines of fragility’.” (Gary Genosko)