2004-01-24

Canadian Film Festival, Day Three, Matinee

La Grande Seduction

This was a lovely little film. True, it is fairly predictable, but you don't see a movie like this for the surprises. The story involves a small coastal Quebec town called St.-Marie-La-Mauderne, a tiny fishing village with fewer than 150 residents. From a distance, it's a picturesque little place, but as soon as you get up close, you can see the peeling paint and the shabbiness of the houses. The town has fallen on hard times since the fishing industry dried up, and all of the town's residents are on the dole. However, one enterprising resident, Germain, has a grand plan to resuscitate the village�s economy and get everyone off welfare: he has submitted a proposal for a plastic container factory to be built in the village. That way, everyone will have a job and no one will have to leave their beloved town. There's one problem, however: the only way the businessman will build a factory there is if the town has a doctor. Needless to say, St.-Marie-La-Mauderne has not been able to convince any doctor to stay for any length of time. No problem: Germain sets out to catch one.

Eventually, through a series of amusing events, the townspeople finally find a doctor who can be persuaded to spend one trial month in St.-Marie-La-Mauderne. The trick will be getting him to stay on after the month is over. Does this faze Germain? Not at all! Immediately, he organizes the entire town in a grand effort to �seduce� the good Dr. Lewis. There is nothing Germain won�t do to make sure that at the end of this month, the doctor won�t be able to imagine leaving this paradise. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so what to do but tap Dr. Lewis�s home phone? The townsfolk find out that the doctor likes cricket, so naturally they research �cricket� on the internet and build their own cricket pitch. They find out that Dr. Lewis�s favourite dish is beef stroganoff, and suddenly that�s the special of the week at the local restaurant.

Most of the humour is pretty broad, but it�s effective. Some of the dialogue is really hilarious, and I say this knowing that a lot of the humour was probably lost in translation. The acting is very good and the coastal scenery is lovely.

At the end of the movie, though, I couldn�t help but feel choked up: St.-Marie-La-Mauderne reminded me so much of Prince Rupert when we visited it this past summer. Fishing villages are a dying way of life, and it was hard to see a former beauty down on its luck, with once-stately Victorian houses turning ugly with neglect. Although I liked the movie a lot, and (of course) it does have a happy ending, I had a lump in my throat at the end of the movie. For every St.-Marie-La-Mauderne that gets its plastic container factory, how many other towns do not? For all its lightness and humour, La Grande Seduction is a funny movie about a serious subject that touches many Canadian communities.

As I�m sure you can tell, I really liked this movie. I give it four cricket bats out of five.

Posted by polarcanuck at 12:50 p.m.

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