The Country Doctor

Jean-Pierre is a family doctor working alone in rural France; he knows everyone in the area and everyone trusts him. He is diagnosed with a brain tumour. Nathalie arrives to help him through treatment: forty years old, long a nurse, and having come to medicine late. Jean-Pierre does not want her. The subject is not illness but being unable to hand your place to anyone. Jean-Pierre sees himself not as a person but as an institution, and the fact that rural medicine really is that kind of burden generates all of the tension. The form is everyday and observational: home visits, a consulting room, country roads. Some of those playing patients are not professional actors but local residents. Thomas Lilti is a director who is a doctor by profession; he trained in medicine and practised. His films come out of that experience, and this is the one that looks outside the hospital to the countryside. Regions of France without a doctor were a live issue at the time and the film addresses it directly. François Cluzet plays Jean-Pierre and Marianne Denicourt plays Nathalie. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet French drama and stories built on a profession. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for dramatic escalation; the film is deliberately uneventful and its ending is measured.