New York paramedic Phil Suarez remembers exactly when he briefly lost his footing on September 11, 2001, paralyzed by the succession of calls signaling “drop-outs” falling from the Twin Towers under attack. This “infernal spiral”, he experienced it again with COVID-19, while the distress calls were added in the spring of 2020. An impression that will have lasted for weeks. ” It was crazy. Up to 7,200 interventions per day, man », He specifies to the camera of Spike Lee, who, in NYC Epicenters 9/11 –> 2021½, offers a stunning choral portrait of his beloved city.
In his viscerally human, sometimes facetious way, the director of BlacKkKlansman and of Da 5 Bloods nurtured a four-hour, two-hour documentary monster. More than 200 people parade there: caregivers, emergency personnel, scientists, politicians, reporters, artists, the sick, the bereaved, the lark! All of them tell of their besieged city, their hearts slung, their eyes wide open to these nameless traumas to which is added the just anger that has gripped New York as the Black Lives Matter movement shook America, then the world. .
Clever, Spike Lee has fun with the archives, drawing as much on the side of the newsreels as on the side of the fictions. Very dynamic, the whole (at least, this is the case for the first three episodes that we have seen) form a disparate mosaic, the fragments of which are nonetheless inextricably united. The filmmaker indeed succeeds in combining all these “we” with a surprising frankness. A beautiful job of seismograph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ866ljcevY
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