It is night in a provincial town. They exit the building holding each other tight. Elsa is 15, Amir 17. They met earlier, this evening, and they can’t separate because they already love each other madly. But she has to go home where her parents are waiting for her, worried: it’s almost 2 o’clock.
To keep her with him a little longer, Amir suggests that Elsa drive her home on the electric scooter parked at the edge of the sidewalk. It’s forbidden to ride two on a scooter, she knows it, and she also likes his rogue side, and then she’ll be able to hug him, which she hasn’t yet managed to do. In short, here they go, hair in the wind. Banal sequence, but which works, thanks to the banality of the thing, precisely. Cinema is only a succession of codes. There, seeing them move away on the lane reserved for buses, we know that something is going to happen. An accident. We hope not because they are really beautiful, happy, young, but if nothing happens it means we are not watching a movie.
It’s always night, the same night, in the parking lot of the hospital in that same provincial town. Romain is 26 years old, he climbs at full speed in his ambulance to go to the corner of rue Henri-Barbusse and avenue de la Liberation, where an accident has just taken place. The spectator immediately imagines that the two lovers, on their scooter, have been knocked down.
Reality, beyond the cinema
To pass red lights without stopping, Romain activates his siren. He knows the city by heart, the streets are deserted, he drives very fast and he likes it. After years of uncertainties and drifts, he finally found the job he needed: at night, speed, saving people, he’s been doing this for six months now. It’s a job where every second counts. It’s more than a job, a responsibility. He already has several exploits to his credit; heart attacks, epileptics, he knows how to do it. In the emergency room, he is appreciated for his composure and his efficiency. And, without immediately pouring into the melodrama, it must be said that for the first time in his life he has the feeling of being on the good side of society. You can’t imagine how happy it is for him to be congratulated and even thanked for something he has done, something good.
He decides to take the quays, at this time, there is no one, he can go up to 150 kilometers per hour, thus avoiding three crossroads and any lost, soaked night owls. It passes under the bridge, leaves the quays to find itself on the avenue de la Gare. He rushes into the bus lane.
Between the moment he sees the electric scooter on which Elsa is hugging Amir and the moment he hits them, Romain will not even have had time to brake. This moment is filmed from inside the ambulance, and in real time, so that we don’t really see, we barely see the scooter flying, we guess a silhouette, without certainty. No slow motion, no sound effects to exaggerate the shock, no music, no shouting, and yet we know. Elsa and Amir are dead.
The interest of the film is the instruction. The star is the judge. It establishes the facts, goes back to their origins, establishes the degree of involvement of each other. He questions them all, without complacency, from the organizers of the evening to the manufacturers of electric scooters, passing by the person in charge of road safety of the city and the head of the emergency department of the hospital. Without forgetting the parents of Romain, Elsa and Amir.
Surprises will come out of these auditions which will undermine the spectator’s certainties, just as it will cause the disappointment of the reader of this column, because this film does not exist. This is a very recent news item, the names have been changed.