The Great Seduction

Santa María is a small fishing island. The fish are gone and people live on state support. A plant is to be built and work will come, but the company has one condition: there must be a doctor resident on the island. Nobody comes. Then a doctor lands there for a short stay. The islanders decide to persuade him to stay. If he likes cricket the island will play cricket; if he likes jazz everyone will pretend to listen to jazz. They listen to his phone calls. The whole island is acting. Celso R. García directs; he wrote the screenplay with Luciana Herrera Caso. Memo Villegas, Pierre Louis and Yalitza Aparicio are in the cast. It is a Mexican production. The film is a Spanish language remake of the 2003 Canadian film Seducing Doctor Lewis. After a limited theatrical run it went out on Netflix on 30 August 2023. The matter it treats is unemployment; the reason for building a false life is single and concrete, work. The narrative does not make a fool of the doctor; at a certain point he sees the situation. Pimienta Films is among the producers. The humour rests on the community; the joke comes not from one character but from the coordination of a crowd. Its limit is originality; the structure is very close to the original and the narrative holds no surprise. Who it is for: viewers who like warm community comedy and Mexican cinema. Who it is not for: it is predictable, the remake faithful, and the ending foreseeable.