"Country doctor", on France 2: ordinary heroism in medical western mode

After the great success of Hippocrates, doctor-director-screenwriter Thomas Lilti once again talks to us about medicine with Country Doctor

"Country doctor", on France 2: ordinary heroism in medical western mode

After the great success of Hippocrates, doctor-director-screenwriter Thomas Lilti once again talks to us about medicine with Country Doctor. This title alone is however enough to affirm that beyond medicine and the presence in the casting of Marianne Denicourt - nominated in 2015 for the César for best actress in a supporting role for Hippocrates -, we will tell something else, even that, in the end, we will be talking about a completely different profession.

At least that's the idea defended by Jean-Pierre Werner (François Cluzet), hardly in a hurry to greet the arrival in his country office, in a corner of Normandy, of a colleague from the city, who had just graduated from medical school, Nathalie (Marianne Denicourt). "Country doctor, he tells her, you can't learn that. “But Nathalie is stubborn, against Jean-Pierre and sometimes even against the inhabitants, unwilling to allow the local hero to be replaced, even for the time of a consultation.

long time sheriff

A hagiographical temptation constantly hovers over Country Doctor. Thomas Lilti half yields to it, without hiding it, and without anyone being tempted to blame him: anyone who has known a Jean-Pierre Werner knows that he can believe without reserve in the likelihood of a life suspended the health of others, or a diagnosis of low back imbalance made by observing a child's shoes.

The strength of the man who, as a young intern, was "led to replace experienced doctors living in the countryside", he confided when the film was released, is however to devote as much vigor to expressing his admiration for his character as to paint the other side of devotion: Werner's determination to defend his territory. Because that is what the life of a country doctor is, too: the illusion of possessing, even without being aware of it and even living it in a sacrificial form, a territory and the lives of men.

Hidden under ordinary heroism, this more troubled stubbornness is revealed in the shock of another stubbornness: that of Nathalie, to whom Marianne Denicourt gives a beautiful aura of mischief and mystery, to stay on Werner's lands.

Between his longtime sheriff and his new arrival in town, the farm accidents and the roads that all look alike and where you get lost, in the midst of finely written secondary characters, who also compete in their own way for the territory and in its name (see in the film the interesting debate in town hall around the possible creation of a medical center), Thomas Lilti invents without fireworks and quite accurately a new genre: the medical western.