Take One (Dec 2003 - Mar 2004)

village, nestling under a starry sky. music and sexual preferences. The islanders already know that he is an obsessive cricket fan, so they pretend to play and love the game. When Christopher gets frustrated by his inability to catch fish, a villager dives under his boat to hook a frozen one onto his line. Meanwhile, Germain (Raymond Bouchard), the village leader who dreamt up the scheme, becomes a wise, caring father to Dr. Lewis, someone who obviously never had one. Throughout all these shenanigans a beautiful young woman (Lucie Laurier) distances herself from the scam and needles Dr. Lewis, but her smile holds promise. Like Pouliot himself, driven by a need to “make things that weren't there before” (he’s referring to more than films), the villagers imagine a difficult goal and attempt to concretize it, inventing ways of tugging Christopher into Ste-Marie—la—Mauderne. The movie’s central tension is about the struggle to make a vaporous dream become real. The challenge is daunting because the islanders have little going for them, apart from their ingenuity and determination. The villagers celebrate their cricket game: > Seducing Doctor Lewis is a culture-clash comedy recalling Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film, Local Hero (a wealthy oil company executive falls under the spell of a faraway Scottish village), or more closely a film Pouliot says he didn’t see until after completing Doctor Lewis, Waking Ned Devine (where the villagers try to convince a lottery official that one of them is the dead winner of a huge prize). The picture’s storyline, incidentally, is the reverse of another movie that debuted at Cannes 2003, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, in which Nicole Kidman’s character spends most of the film trying to ingratiate herself into the lives of the people living in an isolated hamlet. While some might see Seducing Doctor Lewis as yet another whimsical, feel-good picture about eccentric yokels, the movie has an undertow of pathos that deepens it. Pouliot’s depiction of little people grasping at a tiny glimmer of salvation is credible, partly because of the actors’ authenticity and emotional range, especially Bouchard as Germain, Pierre Collin as his disgruntled pal, Yvon, and Benoit Briére as Henri, the village banker who worries about being replaced by an ATM machine. Beyond the Tati-esque sight gags, the deadpan reactions, the quirky dialogue and the funny details like one villager’s array of goony-looking hats, you genuinely empathize with these characters. “I’ve always been convinced that comedy is a form of drama,” says Pouliot. “There is no limit to the dramatic subjects that humour can treat,” citing Marcel Pagnol’s classic french serio-comedies from the 1930s and the Coen brothers’s Fargo as direct influences. “Reading [Scott’s] script, I knew that behind every line of humour, I would be able to bring out some form of dramatic subtext.” During script rewrites of Seducing Doctor Lewis, Pouliot and Scott fine-tuned the relationship between humour and drama at the heart of their movie. They taped all the pages onto walls and colour-coded them, trying to calibrate the shifts between modes. For Pouliot—who once became obsessed with building a house he imagined in a drawing— a screenplay is, more than anything else, “a very complex piece of architecture.” In the design of Seducing Doctor Lewis, the director and writer had to deal with modal shifts, various subplots and several thematic strands. TAKE ONE