Miss and the Doctors (2013)
Two sibling doctors take on a young diabetic patient and both fall for the girl’s lovely mother, who tends bar at a local watering hole, testing their fraternal bonds and professional relationship.
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Great Film overall
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
The original title is Tirez la langue, mademoiselle, or Stick your tongue out, miss. It has been translated as Miss and the Doctors or Say Ahh . The characters are Boris and Dimitri (brothers, doctors, single, in their forties) and Judith (single mother in her mid- thirties, with pre-teenage daughter Alice). The subject is the pursuit of happiness and/or security under steadily decreasing options by the three characters. I was immediately charmed by this movie. Boris and Dimitri obviously love and respect each other, and we learn about them as the movie progresses although mystery remains. Boris is qualified as a "failed athlete" by another character but we never know in what way he failed in what sport. Dimitri calls himself "an alcoholic", obviously in recovery, since we never see him under the influence. He attends AA meetings. Dimitri is more easygoing than Boris, but Boris has a way with children. We also learn of their warm relationship with their mother. At the beginning, the brothers' relationship with Judith is, both are Alice's physicians (Alice suffers from diabetes). Due to her night job, Judith finds it difficult to attend to her daughter's needs.If comparisons must be made one thinks of the works of Eric Rohmer, but the characters here are a lot less cold and calculating than in Rohmer movies, there is little manipulation, and true love is present. The excellence of the scrip by director Axelle Ropert is evident in the dialogues; the characters (especially the two brothers) seldom answer as one expects, as in real life. A not-to-be-missed movie. I hope more of Ropert's work becomes available in the rental services.
If the aim of the Production company was to turn out something verging on the unclassifiable then by and large they have been successful. Withholding information is good: 1) We appear to be in fairly modern times judging by the kind of clothes worn by the characters and cars glimpsed on the streets but only in the last couple of reels does the Cedric Kahn character mention in passing that a character to whom he is speaking was born in 1972 and can anticipate another 40 years of life; the person in question is clearly in the mid thirties ergo the film is set in the present day. 2) again we appear to be in a reasonably large city and despite several outdoor shots there are no recognizable landmarks; eventually, again in the last reel, Cedric Kahn asks a character who had moved away when she came back to Paris, thus telling us where we are (it turns out that the film was shot and is set in a Chinese area of Paris). One could, of course, argue that such is the story it is academic where the story is set and in what time-frame and that may well be true because a time-frame and a location where doctors are not so much doctors as Saints - happy to make house calls 24/7 and taking a personal, humane interests in patients they treat as individuals rather than numbers is something I have not encountered in the modern age. Furthermore the doctors - brothers, who, bizarrely, work in tandem treating even the most mundane illnesses as a duo - are making losses rather than profits and ultimately close the office. One of the brothers is STATED by both himself and others to be an alcoholic but appears to be the picture of health and is never seen with a drink in his hand or with a hangover. The plot, such as it is, has both brothers falling in love with the same woman, the mother of one of their patients. She chooses, for no apparent reason, one of the two, leaves him when her estranged husband returns out of the blue, then comes back to him. Improbable charm seems the best way to summarise this entry.