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Raymond Bouchard, left, and David Boutin
The film is about more than the plight of people who are so down and out they lack even basic medical care. “There is,” he says, “in life, the apparent truth and the truth that lies behind.” As a successful doctor, “Christopher has the apparent truth, but he’s on a quest, and I think what he’s trying to find is a deeper truth. He’s not aware but he has a sense that everything in his life is false. And he’s going to find that deeper truth from the very people who are deceiving him at every turn. I thought this was very, very exciting: to have the liars become the bearers of the real truth.” For Pouliot, this irony was central to his vision of the movie. “When you can find one symbol, and you can build from that, then you know you'll have a form of unity.”
Of course, to discover the truth he’s seeking, Christopher must embrace the island itself. When he first lands on Ste—Marie—La—Mauderne, its bleak rawness shocks him. He’s the kind of Montrealer who hangs out in slick restos; the island has one, purely functional café. As the film advances, Seducing Doctor Lewis effectively portrays the way a primitive, seemingly forbidding place can magically transform in the eyes of an outsider. In different parts of the world, many people have been through conversions like Dr. Lewis's. At first he’s appalled by the isolation, poverty and lack of familiar amenities but then the island lights up. He falls in love with its landscape and people.
Seducing Doctor Lewis was filmed in a genuinely remote location: Harrington Harbour, a northern Quebec island that has a population of about 300 and faces across from
DECEMBER 2003 — MARCH 2004
“There is no
to the
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subjects that
can treat Jean-Francois Pouliot
Newfoundland. “My fear from the beginning,” Pouliot recalls, “was that the island was too beautiful, and I tried to bring it down as much as possible.” The director of photography, Allen Smith, and the art department found ways of leaching out the island’s beauty for the opening scenes and then letting it re-emerge as it blossoms in Christopher’s eyes. The visual nuance added to the difficulties of a complicated shoot in a place inaccessible by road and sometimes dangerous to reach by sea.
Because Pouliot handled the difficult project so effectively, many are surprised to learn that Seducing Doctor Lewis is his first feature. The 46-year-old has shot several episodes of Emily of New Moon, but most of the credits on his resumé are television commercials such as his “Monsieur B” campaigns for Bell. Wildly popular in the Quebec market since 1992, the spots feature Benoit Briére, Pouliot’s friend and collaborator, playing multiple roles: the hapless “B” and the cartoony characters he interacts with. Unfolding on sets recalling 1960s Richard Lester movies, the ads are stylized mini-comedies about Bell services and products that don’t appear. Briére mimes all the actions.
For years, Pouliot didn’t make movies because he thought the scripts he was offered were lame and underfunded, or when he asked writers for more drafts on ideas with potential, they balked. “I need to have fun,” he explains. “T need to believe that somehow there is a chance that