[First Wave wants us to feel a sliver of the same fury and
impotence and eventually, occasionally, mercifully, even the same
catharsis that frontline workers were confronted with every day when
this nightmare was at its worst. ] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

"THE FIRST WAVE" REVIEW: MATTHEW HEINEMAN’S COVID DOC IS
OVERWHELMINGLY EMOTIONAL  
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David Erlich
October 7, 2021
IndieWire
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_ First Wave wants us to feel a sliver of the same fury and impotence
and eventually, occasionally, mercifully, even the same catharsis that
frontline workers were confronted with every day when this nightmare
was at its worst. _

Dr. Nathalie Dougé tending patients in the documentary “The First
Wave” , National Geographic

 

At this time in 2020, there was exactly one feature-length film about
COVID-19: Hao Wu’s “76 Days,” a bracing vérité portrait of the
Wuhan lockdown that contrasted the chaos inside four of the city’s
hospitals with the funereal quiet that blanketed the empty streets
outside. A year later, _every_ film so inevitably seems like it’s
about the pandemic in one way or another that actual documentaries on
the subject risk leaving a strange aftertaste of redundancy; an
unavoidable side effect when it comes to a crisis that every potential
viewer on the entire planet has lived through, at least to a certain
extent.

The nature of that extent varies widely, though — not just around
the globe or between red and blue states, but also across the zip
codes that cinch individual cities into clear socio-economic divides.
It varies between the people who survived the virus, and the people
who loved people who didn’t; the people who lost some part of
themselves, and the people who rode out the storm in relative peace;
the people who risked their lives by fighting the problem, and the
people who risked _everyone’s_ lives by pretending that it
didn’t exist. 

 
 

Matthew Heineman [[link removed]]’s
“The First Wave [[link removed]]”
strives to close those gaps with simple, brute-force strength.
Plunging viewers inside one of New York City’s hardest-hit hospital
systems at a time when the Empire State had more COVID deaths than any
whole country on Earth, Heineman’s pandemic film is every bit as
visceral and harrowing as you might expect from someone accustomed to
making documentaries that he may not survive (his previous subjects
include Mexican drug cartels and ISIS-controlled Syria). But if the
warzone-like prologue of his latest project — in which a very sick
patient video-chats with his family via the hospital iPad before dying
in the middle of a hallway just a few minutes later — anticipates a
film that’s told at a toe tag remove, the rest of “The First
Wave” derives its staggering emotional power from a more close-up
mode of portraiture.

Bringing Heineman’s signature point-of-view to an unexpectedly
intimate profile of three essential workers as they wage the fight of
— and in some cases for — their lives, “The First Wave”
eschews the broader horrors of the situation in order to Zoom in on a
small handful of people, rescue the pandemic from the brink of
abstraction, and shrink it back down to a human scale. If Heineman
always goes straight for the heart of the matter, this time he goes
for our hearts, too.

“The First Wave” is bookended by a cacophony of overlapping EMT
calls; there are eight million COVID stories in the naked city, and
these are just a few of them. And while Heineman obviously had no way
of knowing which patients to follow when his skeleton crew was granted
access to the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in March 2020,
identifying the right doctor couldn’t have been easier.

Physician Nathalie Dougé immediately offers herself as the movie’s
spine, and her presence — tireless but exasperated — provides a
clearer look through the eye of the storm than Andrew Cuomo’s
occasional narration (lifted from his press conferences) ever could. A
first-generation Haitian American who never loses sight of the bigger
picture despite the intense personal responsibility she feels for her
patients, Dr. Dougé balances her relatable hopelessness with an
almost superhuman resolve. Her anger at the cruelty of the virus and
the disparity of its victims unlocks an entire spectrum of emotions
for Heineman to explore, and her ability to remain so good at her job
despite grappling with the limitations of her power only makes her
more heroic. “Before I felt like I was saving lives,” she says at
one point, retreating from the camera with tears in her eyes. “Now I
just hope and pray that this shit doesn’t happen to you.”

Unfortunately, it’s already happened to so many other essential
workers. The other two Heineman focuses on caught his attention for
obvious reasons, and both presumably earned their spotlight here
because of their brutal 12-round fights against this stupid fucking
plague. 36-year-old NYPD school safety officer Ahmed Ellis is somehow
charismatic even when he’s in a respirator-induced coma, and his
journey back home to his wife and their two children is an absolute
heart-wringer. Heineman’s narrow focus allows him to have a camera
in the room with Ellis as his stats crash and come back to life. Not
only does “The First Wave” let us share in a number of Facetime
conversations between Ellis and his wife Alexis, the film also takes
the time to jump through that iPad screen and feel the virus’ toll
from the other side. It’s not a particularly sophisticated
technique, but no previous COVID doc has so patiently sifted through
the awful logistics of loving someone in quarantine.

Even more unbearable is the situation regarding Philippines-born nurse
Brussels Jabon, who became gravely ill with COVID when she was nine
months pregnant. We meet her in the aftermath of her emergency
C-section, as she remains on a ventilator while her infant is
quarantined in the NICU and her boyfriend is stuck at home. It’s no
mystery why hospital staff became so personally invested in
Brussels’ survival, but the emotional immediacy of her story is
crucial to Heineman’s film; in a different context such a dramatic
example might pull the focus away from less “E.R.”-worthy cases of
the virus, but “The First Wave” is valuable because of its
tear-jerking tendencies, not in spite of them (you will cry every
single time someone pulls out an iPad).

We may only have so much need or patience for more COVID documentaries
at this point, but in a sub-genre so far defined by Wiseman-esque acts
of witnessing and _how the hell did this happen?_ postmortems,
“The First Wave” is such a valuable addition because of its
body-shaking wallop. While H. Scott Salinas and Jon Batiste’s morose
string score helps set the mood, Heineman doesn’t have to belabor
the point in order to move his audience. On the contrary, he only has
to hold his gaze — to refocus our attention on the human toll this
virus took on us, and reiterate why it’s possibly even more
dangerous now that so many people are tempted to think about it in the
past tense or as someone else’s problem.

That phenomenon is as much a survival mechanism as it is a moral
dilemma, and “The First Wave” threads the needle between those two
separate forces — particularly as the calendar flips to May 2020,
and Dr. Dougé takes to the streets in the aftermath of George
Floyd’s murder. Heineman only has so much bandwidth to focus on the
protests, but the rage and bloodied frustration that Dr. Dougé
channels along the barricades is raw enough to reflect the film’s
broader fight against numbness.

This is a documentary that unashamedly wants to light up our emotions;
it wants to rekindle the fires inside of us that may have burned out
after being exposed to so much preventable death; it wants us to feel
a sliver of the same fury and impotence and eventually, occasionally,
mercifully, even the same catharsis that frontline workers were
confronted with every day when this nightmare was at its worst. If
anything, Heineman is almost too restrained in his approach. Too
afraid that he might push things too far and make us numb to it all
over again. One particularly grim sequence follows a body bag from the
ICU to a morgue truck parked outside the hospital, but that journey
— perhaps too long to play out in real-time — is edited in a way
that makes it all too easy to lighten the burden of what it’s
showing us.

“The First Wave” is more effective when it forces viewers to sit
with the weight of what’s been lost. Not only because it leaves us
even more grateful for the lives that Dr. Dougé and her colleagues
are able to save, but also because it underscores the enormity of all
that we haven’t allowed ourselves to grieve. It’s hard to predict
what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will
just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile
wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will
never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by
its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could
use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

"FIRST WAVE" IS CURRENTLY SCREENING IN THEATERS.  IT WILL SOON BE
STREAMED ON HULU.

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