Asphalt City Review: The Big Apple Is Rotten to the Core in Cynical E.M.T. Drama

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Asphalt City was originally titled Black Flies, after the Shannon Burke novel from which it’s adapted, when it premiered last year at Cannes. For a film about the difficult situations that E.M.T. workers have to deal with on New York City’s streets, Asphalt City has an appropriate directness. But it’s Black Flies that more accurately reflects the film’s lurid register. It’s a reference to an encounter that rookie E.M.T. worker Ollie Cross (Tye Sheridan) has on the job that echoes a childhood trauma, but the way the filmmakers shoot the moment, it’s as if they’re touting their belief in New York as a rotted corpse.

Regardless of what it goes by, the film reveals its agenda from the moment that Ollie walks to a crime scene in the projects and the herky-jerky camera approximates his addled consciousness. Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn) testily guides Ollie as the rookie attempts a tracheostomy of the man they pulled into the ambulance. It’s a crucial moment insofar as it establishes the simplistic way in which the film both grasps and charts patterns of cause and effect (performing a successful tracheostomy will later restore Ollie’s faith in his job), as well as its belief in absolutes. As soon it’s clear that that the E.M.T.s aren’t going to bring back the man from the brink of death, we get a cutaway to a cop, who had been sitting in the ambulance the whole time, regarding the scene with a stone-cold sense of clarity about the worth of the dead man.

If you have a relative of a certain political persuasion with particular thoughts about New York City (read: that it’s gone to hell), Asphalt City will be their red meat. Which isn’t to say that the film is some kind of right-wing screed. Over the course of Asphalt City, Ollie will save lives, including that of a man for whom pork chops and French fries is a routine lunch and an HIV-positive woman (Kali Reis) who used heroin at the precise moment that she was delivering her newborn. However jejune the depiction of Ollie wrestling with the toll of his work on his psyche, namely in scenes with his cypher of a girlfriend (Raquel Nave) that verge on performance art, you don’t doubt that the film believes that the lives of the down and out are worth saving.

That much is clear in the two scenes from the film that end with Gene being placed on administrative leave, and Penn does quietly spectacular work conveying the high cost that his character’s paramedic work exacts on him. In spite of the presentation of one of the ordeals, not because of it, Penn makes you see and understand why Gene crosses an ethical line—and before the film gets around to telling you that he actually did. Even in a scene opposite his ex-wife (Katherine Waterston), in which she reveals that she’s seeing someone new, the sadness in Penn’s eyes is enough to tell us all about the trajectory of their relationship over the years.

But, in the end, Asphalt City’s abject luridness is the order of the day. Indeed, this is a film whose most explicit moment isn’t the one where the pit bull that Ollie tried and failed to prevent from being shot by a gang member ends up stuffed into his work locker by a perpetually amped-up colleague, Lafontaine (Michael Pitt), who’s unsubtly propped up by the script as a living, breathing advertisement for burnout symptoms among paramedics.

Between the nature of Ollie’s job and the fact that he’s on the East New York beat, you don’t doubt the authenticity of Asphalt City on a moment-to-moment basis. But in toto, this is less a film than a guttersnipe’s wallow, and no scene is more emblematic of its worldview than one in which Ollie and Gene treat an Arab man suffering from an asthma attack inside a slaughterhouse. As the man collapses to the floor and clings to life, the camera keeps cutting to another man in the back who inexplicably continues to butcher an animal. Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.