Film Review: La Grande Seduction (2006)

The village in the Philippines in which I lived for a few summers as a teenager is small. (How small is it?!) It’s so small that half the residents share the same last name. No joke — one way or another, people are related. One memorable summer a cousin of mine courted his step-cousin, which I guess isn’t genetically verboten but still kinda icky.

Because of its size, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone knows your business, whether you like it or not. People share tools, food, harvests, labor, even children, and we would spend long afternoon hours darting in and out of each other’s homes, watching TV, playing games, only making our way home at dusk just in time for a hearty supper. More often than not, someone would be sharing our meal with us, sometimes a neighbor, sometimes a relative, always a friend.

St.-Marie-la-Mauderne, the fictional Quebec fishing village in Jean-Francois Pouliot’s 2006 charming Quebecois film La Grande Seduction (English title: Seducing Dr. Lewis), is much like my childhood home. It’s actually even smaller, but the leisurely pace of life in a seaside village is much the same anywhere else. And they have one more thing in common that they share with other fishing villages around the world: a diminishing population wracked by a dying economy.

I love love love this film. It’s definitely not Citizen Kane, and more than a few of the characters threaten to veer off into cute caricatures, but the feel-good ending is hard-earned. Pouliot chose his actors well, as the villagers have an easy relationship with each other, as if they really have known each other their entire lives and are merely living out their hard reality in front of an incidental camera. Most importantly, he chose the perfect location, as the real Canadian village of Harrington Harbour, Quebec, evokes just the right mood of lonely desolation mixed with stubborn optimism, a sentiment it shares with its hardy residents.

The film opens with a happy memory. Once upon a time, St.-Marie-la-Mauderne’s life moved in tandem with the rhythms of the sea. The abundant fish in the blue-gray water yielded just enough income to provide the 100 or so residents with a comfortable life, full of good, honest work, three square meals, and lots and lots of matrimonial sex. Evenings ended with the villagers sighing in unison behind wispy curtains under an overstuffed moon, content with their quiet, joyous lives.

Fast forward a couple of decades later, though, and St.-Marie-la-Mauderne’s strapping men no longer wake up at dawn to prepare their fishing boats for a long day at sea. Instead, they line up their pitiful selves at the local post office to collect their biweekly welfare checks, their shoulders slumped in shame, their faces weary and grim. Even the mayor is reduced to taking his place in line, his city now a shadow of its lively self, forgotten by everyone, perhaps even by its own inhabitants. A sorry symbol of the village’s lost hopes is the large church, now mostly empty except for the occasional town meeting, to which only two or three of the village’s 120 residents bother showing up.

One day, the residents receive word that they’re little village is being considered as a possible location for a new factory. The men are cautious but clearly moved — a factory means jobs, a steady paycheck, a chance to reclaim their dignity. It meant that Germain (Raymound Bouchard) wouldn’t have to suffer the humiliation of seeing his wife make the commute to the city for a job. To the town’s long-suffering residents, it meant salvation.

Of course, there’s a catch. The company planning to build the factory insists that whatever location is chosen must have a doctor. And while St.-Marie-la-Mauderne may have lots of old fishermen, a postal worker, a restaurant owner, bartender, even a banker, what it most certainly doesn’t have — and hasn’t had in years — is a doctor.

Desperate to revitalize their dying town, Germain and his friends scheme to lure a doctor to their town, sending enticing letters to literally every physician in the province of Quebec requesting applications for the position of village doctor. Only one responds, and he’s not a promising candidate: Dr. Christopher Lewis (David Boutin), a handsome but cocky young plastic surgeon from Montreal whose only reason for even boarding the ferry to the remote outpost is to escape a traffic ticket. Of course, the residents don’t know this, but even if they did, they likely wouldn’t care. All the want is to seduce this reluctant city doctor so that they can fulfill the requirements of the company dangling a lifeline in front of them, and they will do anything — anything, even lie and cheat and pretend to love cricket and tap the bewildered doctor’s phone — to convince Dr. Lewis to stay.

The premise is simple, if a little unbelievable, but the actors ring true in their portrayal of a small, tight-knit community that wants nothing but the chance to feel worthy of life. Ken Scott’s script calls for the villagers to engage in some pretty devious tricks to make the good doctor believe that St.-Marie-la-Mauderne is paradise on earth, and at times the pathetic attempts skirt the line between clever and just plain cruel, as when Germain — after overhearing a phone conversation in which he learns that Dr. Lewis never had a father — tries to endear himself to the doctor by pretending to mourn the loss of a son about the same age as Christopher. The delicious, forbidden thrill of eavesdropping on a stranger’s phone conversation is diluted with the sober reality of the doctor’s messy private life, now fodder for gleeful gossip at the town meetings.

Still, the delicate balance works, as the actors inject a generous dose of salt-of-the-earthiness in their roles, and even Boutin as Dr. Lewis redeems himself, despite a rather dubious introduction to the audience. We first meet Christopher in a sterile doctor’s lounge in Montreal, poking fun at the flyer he receives in the mail touting the benefits of living in St.-Marie-la-Mauderne, while mainlining a row of coke powder on the glass coffee table. It’s not the most auspicious of beginnings for a character ostensibly the hero of the tale, but like Germain, the cranky and self-absorbed Yvon (Pierre Collin), and even the mousy and officious banker Henri, all of whom have their own sins to confess, he’s quietly and ironically transformed by the village, the people, the sad but necessary plan that would have upended a less noble, less sympathetique man.

There is, evidement, a love interest flirting at the fringes of the story, but ultimately it’s the evolving relationship between Germain and Christopher Lewis that firmly anchors the story and moves it forward to its satisfying conclusion. Theirs is a peculiar kind of love story between an old man about to surrender his crumbling life in despair, and a young man reluctant to embrace the new life he’s been forced to adopt. When the inevitable hour of truth arrives, and Dr. Lewis is faced with the complicated web of deception in which he’s lived for an entire month, his pain of betrayal is matched by the sorrow felt by Germain, the betrayer, and you don’t doubt for a moment the sincerity of either men. It’s a crucial moment that requires an actor sensitive to the turmoil roiling in his character’s conscience, and both men admirably meet the challenge.

The two quibbles I involve the aforementioned love interest and the ending. Eve (Lucie Laurier), the comely postal clerk who catches Christopher’s eye shortly after arrival, barely registers on the viewer’s radar screen as anything more than a lovely wraith. An inscrutable shadow of a character, she seems completely out of her league among her neighbors in St.-Marie-la-Mauderne. A slim, gorgeous young woman who reads heavy books and practices yoga at dawn by the sea? Where exactly did she come from, and why is she here? Did she wander into the lot by accident from another film? She’s one of those irritating creatures on film who lack any kind of personality and exists only to serve the needs of the story, like a one-woman Greek chorus standing in as the proxy for the all-knowing, moral audience. While nearly everyone else in the village appears transformed by the appearance of Dr. Lewis, Eve remains the enigma throughout the story, her aloof demeanor apparently meant to represent some kind of emotional depth and intelligence, a feat that fails miserably and only ends up confusing the audience.

As for the ending, it was perhaps the only time that the film stumbled on the way to its finale. The scene in which Dr. Lewis confronts Germain and the villagers with the truth of his life in the community seems rushed and abrupt, reminding me of my English teacher’s adage about how the definition of conclusion is the point in which the writer tired of the story. Up to that point in the film, the seduction of Dr. Lewis is at times bittersweet, comical, even painful, but you understand why the villagers’ cling so fiercely to this harebrained plan despite its obvious shortcomings, while at the same time you pity Dr. Lewis for being caught unawares in the middle of such terrible manipulation and guile. The ending, however, arrives too suddenly and wraps up everything too neatly, creating a vacuum of expectations following the previous 100 minutes of well-executed, tightly written drama. I certainly wasn’t expecting a Full Monty-ish climax with a rousing payoff, but at least something that respects the sinister nature of the central conflict would have been gratifying.

Despite the weak ending, however, I would still recommend La Grande Seduction to anyone seeking a feel-good movie with excellent, subtle acting, gorgeous scenery and well-written script. The last few film reviews I’ve done have been rather heavy on the melodrama, so this was a very welcome change, not to mention an optimistic film in which to open the new year.

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