Film Review: The Country Doctor

"A doctor's job is just to fix, to fix nature's bullshit mistakes."
Doctors in remote areas have always been a sacred and irreplaceable presence in medical dramas, and with medicine as developed as 2017 unable to reach small rural towns, the only people you can rely on are the village doctors who are on call day and night and know every blade of grass, cat and dog in town. But when the village doctor himself falls ill, who can save him?
The English title 'Irreplaceble', meaning irreplaceable, becomes the central theme of the plot of The Village Doctor, but it is also the problem to be solved in the story, about the doctor's heavy sense of mission that no one can replace, about the lack of medical resources in the town, and about the villagers' ready and urgent dependence.
The story of "The Country Doctor" is a slow and unentertaining one, the familiar flavor of the French countryside, a slow story and a light touch of human warmth, but with a hidden bitterness like an American coffee, tasteless but addictive. Jean-Pierre is the only doctor in the town and, unlike the tight pace of the big hospitals, he listens carefully to his patients' needs and feelings. But what happens when the only source of water you rely on dries up? So a new woman doctor arrives, but how can the new source of water be drunk without fear?
Although the publicity and synopsis describe The Village Doctor as a slightly ambiguous medical romance, for me the romance element of the film is rather dispensable. From the beginning, when the crux of the issue is pointed out, The Village Doctor leads the way with solid medical content about the town, with house-to-house visits and consultations, and long queues of interviews and consultations.
In contrast, the underlying problems of the town have to be solved in the face of everyday medical dependence, and the doctor is half-heartedly convinced of the answers at hand, believing himself to be irreplaceable and understanding that not everyone is cut out to be a 'country doctor'. In many medical dramas we learn of the helplessness of the country doctor, a group of doctors stranded on the shore in the ever-changing flood of medical knowledge, just trying to save the lives of each and every one of the townspeople in front of them.
Through the special cases of several townspeople, the two country doctors gradually show the possibilities of collaboration, from emergencies to more psychological difficulties and the burden of old age.
"The personalities of the townspeople could be divided into hunters and non-hunters and it was easy to see. But my dad is neither. He thinks he's a god and that the world will end if the town is without him.
The film confronts small-town medicine as an unspoken means of dealing with the two approaches when confronted with several cases, and the slow process of the new doctor adapting to the town, before finally ending with a political debate on small-town medicine that successfully leads to the notion that medicine is most about cooperation.
The Village Doctor may lack the cinematic entertainment to relieve stress, but it has the distinctive flavour of old-school French cinema. The orange well needs to be dug and soaked, and the apricot grove needs to be protected by tigers who protect the fruit in exchange for rice.