2004 Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Audience Award Dramatic
This is a splendid film. The actors are excellent and they sustain the plot with convincing roles.
This is a French - Canadian film with a rather unbelievable plot, A tiny village works together to attract a factory investor. The feel of this film (the acting, direction and filming) are trademark French and the humour is light but "laugh out loud" funny. It does feel very amateur and unpolished at times but remains good fun.
The story of 'Seducing Dr Lewis' revolves around the inhabitants of the small French Canadian fishing village St. Marie-La-Mauderne. With the local fishing industry dead and the majority of its residents reduced to scraping a living on welfare, a glimmer of hope is on the horizon when the prospect of a plastic container factory being built would solve all of the towns' economic problems. The only catch is that there must be a local population of at least 200 which should include a full-time doctor; the trouble is St. Marie-La-Mauderne has neither. With the locals willing to do anything to get the factory built they instigate a plan to seduce a plastic surgeon named Christopher Lewis into finding their village so irresistible he won't want to leave. This includes his favourite meals always being on the menu in the local restaurant, sticking dead fish on his hook when he goes fishing, and on hearing the Dr is a cricket fan forming a fake cricket league where nobody knows the rules and the team kits are made of home made jumpers and long-johns. This is a great film and very much in the style of the old Ealing comedies of the 1950's, gentle, warm and very, very funny. If you love old fashioned comedies like 'Whiskey Galore' and 'Passport to Pimlico', and don't mind the subtitles then 'Seducing Dr Lewis' is a must see rental.