Take me home, country road!
You don’t see that many films about doctors as you do say, journalists, cops or heaven forbid…writers. Yet the job of a doctor can be quite the screenwriter’s dream, offering many passages of drama into the human soul through all that suffering and tangibility that lackluster health can ignite.
Hence, it was quite refreshing to see a film about a life of a doctor working in a remote countryside community. And guess what? It’s directed by a doctor-turned-filmmaker! Coincidence? I think not!
The Country Doctor aka Irreplaceable is a French drama film directed by Thomas Lilti starring French heavy hitters François Cluzet & Marianne Denicourt. This movie’s tale takes you into the life of our leading man Jean-Pierre Werner’s duties as the sole doctor of a French countryside area. The film wastes no time at the beginning giving you Jean-Pierre’s first dilemma, he’s got a serious life threatening illness that starts with C and needs to figure out how to continue serving his community with a ticking clock of mortality as well as help train a suitable replacement played by Marianne Denicourt.
As far as premises go, this film has quite an intriguing one. A refreshing escape from the urban cityscapes of so many Hollywood films, Liliti gives you an exploration of how tight rural communities can be and the beauty of having such a tight-knit group of people living together and supporting each other. Not to mention you get to see the life of two doctors trying to maintain an entire community which is directed and written by a qualified and experienced French physician that had a career change for visual storytelling.
Liliti is a fascinating one when it comes to pace. Unfortunately, the films second and third acts come across as somewhat bloated and detracted from the beautiful characterisation of our two talented leads. Too many supporting characters' arcs - the town's patients - make the film more like a few episodes of House M.D rather than a solid and coherent story. Apart from one of these patients that paint his predicament neatly into the meaningful progression of the plot, it’s hard to feel too much for what happens to the other two or three patients since there was too little establishment and too little room for such drama to unfold. This, in turn, pays the price of precious character development for our two leads which left you wanting much, much more leading to an abrupt and ambiguous ending that feels more cheap than resolute.
However, the performances of this film are top notch. Our supporting lady Marienne Denicourt steals the show from our male lead, delivering her role with grace, clarity and those subtle little micro-expressions that every good actress has under their belt. There is a much-needed warmth and tenderness that her enthusiastic doctor role needed and she fully encapsulated that and then some. Subtlety is a beautiful thing in acting.
The Country Doctor has a promising premise with ambitious goals in storytelling. A country doctor’s life has been told with a juxtaposed tableau of sweetness and melancholy that was refreshing, to say the least. If only the film’s script focused more on the relationship between Cluzet and Denicourt, we could’ve had a more solid drama and maybe even a proper romance. In addition to some oddly slow pacing and drawn out editing choices, The Country Doctor just misses the mark on being a French drama powerhouse that it had its sights on.
The Country Doctor will be in selected Australian cinemas on Thursday, April 6th.
