FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SEDUCING DOCTOR LEWIS
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
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