Urgences (1988)
Directed by Raymond Depardon

Film Review

For the past three and half decades, France's leading documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon has led us into some weird and wonderful places, from the frenetic world of the paparazzi in Reporters (1980) to the Stygian reality of the Paris police force in Faits divers (1983).  More recently, he has received acclaim for his trilogy of films depicting the pleasures and hardships of rural life, which concluded with his sobering La Vie moderne (2007).  Influenced by cinéma vérité, Depardon is content to show life as he finds it, without imposing his own point of view, and therein lies the power of his art: its raw, unsullied sense of truth.  Nowhere is this more effective than in Urgences, a brutally honest exposé of mental illness, filmed at a Paris hospital which, as soon becomes apparent, is poorly equipped to cope with the demands of its out-patients.

Eight years prior to this, Depardon made a similar film, within the confines of a psychiatric hospital in Italy, San Clemente (1980).  Urgences is a starker, more intimate work than this, one that (presumably because of its central Parisian location) has a greater sense of immediacy.  None of the patients we see, who range from mildly stressed-out depressives to self-harming schizophrenics, has yet been committed, and some will be allowed to walk away without treatment after their consultation with a trained psychiatrist.  What is most striking about the collection of tormented souls that Depardon shows us is how ordinary they are - we could pass any one of them in the street without noticing - and yet each of them is afflicted with some form of mental disorder which has made their life unbearable.  Even in our supposedly enlightened times, mental illness is little understood and treated with derision by most people, a taboo subject that we instinctively feel should be swept under the carpet.  It is because there is still such a stigma attached to mental illness that Depardon's film has such social importance and impact.  No one who watches the film can fail to be moved and unnerved by it, yet it says what must be said, honestly and without embellishment.

Of course we should be cautious about taking everything we see in the film at face value.  Some of the participants are clearly aware of the camera and are putting on a performance, acting the foul-mouthed buffoon or just idly talking into the lens as they await the attention of a busy member of staff.  We can never know the extent to which the presence of Depardon's film crew and equipment influence the behaviour of the subjects but, once the interviews have got underway, it is striking how authentic the contributions are.  Prompted by a sympathetic ear, unashamed of the experience of baring their souls, the interviewees draw us into their private hell with ease as they express their neuroses and revulsion with life in the most vivid and eloquent terms.  Sometimes what we see and hear is just too much to bear.  The tearful testimony of a suicidal young woman suffering from paranoid delusions cuts through us like a serrated knife.  The pregnant woman who apparently smashed up a bar after its owner kicked her harmless little dog has a saintly quality about her, a champion for decency in a world that has lost its moral compass.  The lonely old man who tried to kill himself in a public staircase (to the annoyance of his neighbours) can see the lighter side of his act but is still desperately earnest in his desire to die.

What the film also shows - and this is its most depressing aspect - is how hopelessly overstretched and ill-equipped the psychiatric staff are in coping with the tide of human misery that comes their way every day of the week.  Their ears may be open but they struggle to find the words to comfort and reassure their patients.  In some cases, they cannot even provide a bed for the night in the hospital and must talk their distressed interlocutors into being admitted either to a general hospital or a specialist psychiatric clinic many miles away.  So busy are the well-meaning doctors that they occasionally walk away from their patients without a word, leaving them alone (well, in the company of a small film crew) as they go off to deal with another, more pressing matter.  Once they have seen a psychiatrist, many of the patients are left standing (or sitting on the floor) in the unfurnished stone-walled corridors, waiting to be whisked off into police custody or another hospital.  Urgences is a cry for help - not just from those who are fighting a lone crusade against mental illness, but from a system that simply cannot cope with the burden placed upon it.  Fifteen years on, the film still has a powerful resonance and, going by what we read in the newspapers and see on our television screens these days, you can't help wondering if anything has changed for the better.  Like other intractable problems that lack public interest, it is so much easier to sweep the issue of mental illness under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist...

Film Synopsis

The outward grandeur of the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris betrays nothing of the human dramas being played out within its austere walls.  In this documentary, Raymond Depardon takes us inside Paris's oldest hospital to show its psychiatric staff coping as best they can with their demoralised patients, who range from alcoholic depressives to suicides and full-blown schizophrenics.  It is a world that is unimaginable to most of us, a modern bedlam steeped in human misery.  How can anyone treat these sad, disturbed wretches who have grown sick of life and whose mental anguish is as hard to endure as any physical pain?  Through the lens of his dispassionate, all-seeing camera, Depardon takes us into a place darker than we have ever known...