One can imagine screening this wrenching Swiss film in a double bill with Laura Carreira’s recent On Falling. Two studies of a woman at work. Two protagonists at the end of their tether. Two indictments of contemporary malaise.
Yet the jobs and the pressures within them could hardly be more different. In Carreira’s film, a low-paid warehouse worker trundles down aisles gathering the useless items purchased by online shoppers. In Late Shift, Leonie Benesch plays Floria, a surgical nurse doing vital midnight duty in a hospital strained by understaffing. “It’s just two of us today,” she says repeatedly to aggrieved patients.
Night Shift and On Falling both profit from rigorous research into the respective workplaces. Benesch, so good in last year’s The Teachers’ Lounge, prepared with an internship in a Swiss hospital, and only a professional would question the confidence she brings to injections, dressings and the mopping up of unpleasant bodily fluids. The hospital interior gleams like something from impossible science fiction. The endless high-tech equipment looks to have been pulled straight from its packaging.
All this feels like a rebuke to the staff who, even if so diligent as Floria, find tempers fraying at endless unsolvable problems. Our protagonist can’t get a doctor to deliver bad news to a fretful older patient. She must bark at a patient smoking next to her oxygen tank. All this to a wavering score – sometimes ambient, sometimes ratcheting – from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.
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Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday. As was the case with On Falling, the film opens us up to unseen and underappreciated lives.
A closing note on the nursing crisis in Switzerland points out an unspoken subtext. That country has one of the most advanced healthcare services in Europe. More than a few hospital professionals from other nations may look at Floria’s situation with some envy.
Late Shift is in cinemas from Friday, August 1st
