Movies into Film

Seducing Doctor Lewis

Directed by Jean-François Pouliot

Canada, 2003

Reeling: Raymond Bouchard and David Boutin (Photo: Wellspring)

Filmed in Harrington Harbour, an island far north of the Quebec mainland, Seducing Doctor Lewis (originally La Grande Séduction) opens promisingly with images of palpable moisture: rusted ships docked amid somber gray and translucent pearl horizons, compositions that suggest Sydney Laurence paintings come to life. Torrents of rain splash in through a rustically open window.

All too soon, however, the sitcom begins.

Three crusty old men stand outside a church doorway absently discussing the virginity (or lack thereof) of a native daughter. The sexual fortunes of the young woman in question are known to everyone except her befuddled pa-pa, a bank manager who cashes welfare checks for the village’s unemployed fishermen. The three men (her father and two of his customers) continue standing there after this limp, unfunny joke plays out, and I sensed the director Jean-François Pouliot (a maker of more than 500 commercials, this is his first feature) straining for the offbeat humor that Bill Forsyth had in abundance 20 years ago. Seducing Doctor Lewis often plays like a Forsyth comedy, one with its vital essence drained. This French Canadian film belongs to that idiotic “the entire village has a secret” sub-genre, movies which hinge entirely on a single element that could be cleared up in no time, if only the filmmakers weren’t adamant about stretching a thin deception across 109 minutes. Ken Scott’s screenplay might generously be described as unsubtle and heavy-handed, and Pouliot shuffles the cardboard players along.

Doctor and postmistress (Photo: Wellspring)

The bucolic, grizzled, village fishers launch a whimsical campaign to recruit a doctor to live and work in their island town. How could their efforts not be whimsical with all the cues to accordion music? Their question is “how to make a doc love us and want to stay,” and mine is how did something this mindless ever receive distribution to art houses?

Here’s what offends me: no one in this movie ever has a conversation—absolutely nothing happens that isn’t a function of plot. Scott and Pouliot schlep one laborious gag on top of another, and in the three or four random bits of hostile flirtation between Dr. Lewis (a 30-ish buffoon from Montreal who snorts coke and utters “family values” in the same breath) and a young postmistress (the lone beautiful woman in a hamlet of the homely), it never occurs to the filmmakers that it might reasonably strike Lewis to ask her how she ended up and why she remains in such an isolated community. Ah, but don’t you see, that would involve character development, a major no-no in Foreign Film Lite.

To give you an idea of the movie’s so-called humor, the townsfolk wiretap the doctor’s phone to listen in and thus determine his likes and dislikes. When he confesses to a friend a craving for beef stroganoff, the none-too-bright villagers spread the news of his appetite for “beef struggle of,” which soon becomes “beef bugger off.” Bugger off, incidentally, is what you should do toward any cinema screening this wretched fiasco.

Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton embrace in Code 46 (United Artists)

Code 46

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

UK, 2004

Not much to be said either about or in favor of Code 46, a fatalistic romantic drama with sci-fi trappings. Mark Tildesley’s production design and Alwin Küchler’s cinematography are ravishing (their work was also integral to Roger Michell’s The Mother). Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins are quite believable in bed together; the sex scenes between them hold Frank Cottrell Boyce’s threadbare narrative from falling apart any sooner than it inevitably does. When they aren’t with each other, I missed the pull of their bodies. Morton and Robbins have such genuine sexual chemistry that the misogynist denouement feels exceptionally cruel. Not to mention contrived, puritanical, bankrupt. It’s the sort of “cosmic screw you” ending that’s been done to death in science fiction.

And it’s painful precisely because Morton gives her body and soul to this trash. There are passages in her voice-over that bear aural traces of a young Ingrid Bergman; she’s lovely, even with that same severe boy’s haircut that she wore in In America. Morton appears nude here. She exposes her cleft in a scene that requires her wrists to be tied to bedposts, and in close-up, she breathlessly moans a sweet litany of “I love you’s” to her partner. Any actress willing to do this deserves a better fate.

The futuristic lady from Shanghai: Morton in Code 46 (United Artists)

Essie Davis, magnificent as Vermeer’s wife in Girl with a Pearl Earring, appears briefly as a doctor at a high-tech abortion clinic, a place where both fetuses and memories are removed. Davis’s role has little consequence; still, it’s a blessing to hear a few low notes from her glorious whisky and cigarettes timbre. – NPT

August 15, 2004

Movies into Film

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