SEDUCING DOCTOR LEWIS
Directed by: Jean-François Pouliot.
Produced by: Roger Frappier & Luc Vandal.
Written by: Ken Scott.
Director of Photography: Allen Smith.
Edited by: Dominique Fortin.
Music by: Jean-Marie Benoît.
Released by: Wellspring.
Language: French.
Country of Origin: Canada. 109 min. Not Rated.
With: Raymond Bouchard, David Boutin & Pierre Collin.

Seducing Doctor Lewis is not the ribald West End comedy that may come to mind, but a milder mold of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It's a Quebecois fantasy, where an Anglo-Canadian falls in love with an entire French-Canadian backwater village. St. Marie-La Mauderne, a former fishing hamlet, has hit such hard times that even the mayor is moving away. The once-proud and now-unemployed men of the village are led by the optimistic Germain (Bouchard) to recruit a plastic container factory to locate there. The problem: the town has no doctor, and the plant won't qualify for insurance without one (the nearest hospital is three hours away). The men need to convince a doctor to reside on the remote island. Dr. Lewis (Boutin) from Montreal is blackmailed to live and work there for a month, in order to write off a minor drug violation (how urban). Taking a page from Potemkin, the town splashes a new coat of paint on their weather-beaten homes, while the townsmen even attempt to penetrate a cultural roadblock - cricket, the most puzzling and English of sports, assuming the doctor is a fan. But other tactics are less charming. To orchestrate the campaign, Germain wiretaps the doctor's personal phone calls.

Although the set-up is breezy and economical, the broadly played characters wear thin, especially Germain's judgmental, mean-spirited alcoholic friend Yvan (Collin). They, as well as the plot, are predictable. With its opening sequence - a hilarious flashback to happier times when all the adults made nocturnal whoopee like clockwork - Seducing Doctor Lewis climaxes way too soon. Kent Turner
June 16, 2004