Compelling ‘Late Shift’ puts nursing on critical list
Is there a more thankless job than nursing? Doctors marginalize you, while patients treat you as if you’re their valet or waiter. Then there are the dangers of poking yourself with an infected syringe or worse, errantly administering medication while rushing to be in five places at once. Is it any wonder fewer and fewer of these aspiring Florence Nightingales are signing up to take the place of the multitudes who have quit because they can no longer handle the stress and low pay?
The resulting shortage is quietly closing in on becoming a crisis. And you should be worried, because the fewer nurses, the greater the likelihood you might die because there is no one left to rush to your side when you need them most. That’s the sobering takeaway from Petra Volpe’s riveting docudrama “Late Shift.” On paper, there would seem to be little promise in the premise of shadowing a member of an understaffed Swiss nursing crew over one 12-hour stint. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
What Volpe delivers is jaw-dropping, while drawing on every ounce of empathy for an idealistic young nurse possessing incredible patience for a host of patients, most of them either battling or about to succumb to cancer. By the time the shift mercifully ends for lonely divorcee Floria Lind (Leonie Benesch, superb), you – and she – will be emotionally spent and eager to lobby for canonization.
You appreciate the subtlety with which Volpe (“The Divine Order”) and Benesch clue you in to the tiny details of Floria’s life, such as how underpaid she is, as illustrated by her need to catch a bus to work because she’s unable to afford a car. Or, a brief phone call slyly suggesting the tenuous status of her relationships with her ex and their young daughter, neither of whom has the time nor the inclination to engage with Floria.
And how does that square with the Floria we see on the job, admired by her peers and most of her patients for her dedication? And might that be the issue, that she’s more involved with her work than her semi-estranged family? You assume that’s the assumption Volpe wants us to make: That Floria spent far more energy caring for the sick and dying than she did on nurturing her own family … apart from yesterday, when she spent three hours with her daughter ogling monkeys in a cage.
Tonight, though, is less a zoo and more like a three-ring circus in which everything seems to be happening at once on a shift when there’s only she and her buddy, Bea (Sonja Riesen), caring for more than two dozen patients. Some are totally dependent on them and their trainee, Amelie (Selma Jamal Aldin), while others are fully ambulatory, and still others are either being prepped for surgery or being sent up from recovery.
Before the night is through, some will die, and still others will come to accept their mortality. We meet roughly a dozen of them while following Floria on her rounds, performing such menial tasks as changing the soiled diaper of an elderly woman with incontinence, or catering to the whims of a wealthy a-hole who believes he takes priority over all others. We witness her switching out IV bags, comforting the frightened and insecure, recording blood pressures and admonishing a woman who insists on smoking cigarettes while connected to an oxygen tank. Is it any wonder Floria eventually goes kablooey?
Through it all, Benesch is a marvel. As a veteran of numerous hospital stays, I can attest to the precision with which she performs every nursing task, like she’s been doing it her whole life. That requires great skill, but not as much as it does for an actress to invest so thoroughly in her character that you forget she’s acting. There are no big “ER”-like moments in which sure-goners are miraculously brought back to life just before we cut to the next commercial. No, in “Late Shift,” death is eerily realistic, if not haunting.
Easily the most moving moment arrives when Floria must perform the solemnest of duties in gently preparing a corpse to be wheeled off to the morgue, where it will be placed in cold storage, while the now empty bed returns to the third floor to accommodate the next person in what seems like a hospital assembly line.
It borders on mechanized health care, and the only argument against such heartlessness is the compassion Benesch instills in her every scene. As was the case with exceptional work in “The Teacher’s Lounge” and “September 5,” Benesch is cornering the market on fleshing out staunch professionals pushed to the brink by the immense pressures of jobs vital to the public good. All I can say is we want more of what she’s serving, even if, in Floria’s case, it’s a box of juice for a diabetic with low blood sugar or a couple of Tootsie Pops for the grandchildren of a nana on death’s door.
Happy, it’s not. But uplifting, “Late Shift” most definitely is. And next time you see a nurse in a hospital or on the street, tell them “Thank you for your service.” Because without unsung heroines like Floria, we’d surely be worm food long before our time.
Movie review
Late Shift
Rated: Not rated
Cast: Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen and Selma Jamal Aldin
Director: Petra Volp
Writer: Petra Volpe
Runtime: 90 minutes
Where: In theaters March 20 (limited)
Grade: B+
