HIPPOCRATES: DIARY OF A FRENCH DOCTOR -- proves yet another interesting French medicine movie from Thomas Lilti

Thomas Lilti seems a filmmaker smitten with the medicine bug. Of the four full-length films and single television series he has directed (and either written or co-written), only one of these -- his first film, Les yeux bandés -- did not deal primarily with doctors, hospitals and patients. TrustMovies does not know French cinema all that well, but he suspects it might be safe to call out M. Lilti as the go-to guy for movies medicinal. The current home video release of his 2014 film, HIPPOCRATES: DIARY OF A FRENCH DOCTOR (which saw a very limited U.S. arthouse theatrical run in the summer of 2015) simply adds to the ammunition for this idea, which began when I viewed via last year's home video release of another of his movies, The Country Doctor.

Turns out that M. Lilti, pictured at right, was actually a medical doctor prior to his movie career so this, I suspect, adds a good deal of veracity to his work. The Country Doctor (from 2016) dealt with a younger female physician taking over the practice of an older doctor (who is silently suffering from a cancer diagnosis). Hippocrates, was actually made two years prior and details the experiences of two interns in a city hospital which seems to have gone from public to privately-owned -- which means having to somehow turn a profit.

One of these interns is a very young man, played by the baby-faced Vincent Lacoste (above), and the other is an older immigrant (the always excellent Reda Kateb, below) who was a full-fledged doctor in his native Algeria but now must work his way back up the ladder in France.

How these two interact with each other, with their patients and the rest of the hospital staff -- Lacoste's characters is the son of one of the primary doctors at the hospital, and so this complicates matters -- provides the meat of the movie, during which we see the physicians in charge make decisions more for the good of the hospital than for the good of their patients.

The supporting cast includes Marianne Denicourt (above, right, playing a physician torn between doing the right thing and the most politic thing) and Jacques Gamblin (above, center, as Lacoste's dad, who is also between that rock and hard place). No one here is an out-and-out villain, but our two interns are definitely the "heroes" of the movie.

The questions the film raises are very much worth asking and ruminating over, and the details of hospital life and death seem compelling and true. Overall, the film's worth seeing but, as with The Country Doctor, the finale seems just a little too rushed, easy and "feel-good" to be totally acceptable. It turns reality a tad too much toward the typical movie happy ending.

Running a relatively lean 102 minutes and released theatrically by Distrib Films US and now on DVD via Icarus Home Video, Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor hits the street this coming Tuesday, January 15 -- for purchase and/or (I hope) rental.

DVDebut -- Thomas Lilti's French charmer THE COUNTRY DOCTOR: an Rx for what ails you

Some movies seem to exist to give expected pleasures -- the good ones with smart, realistic detail that pulls you in; the not-so-good ones via the usual thudding cliches -- and today's "watch," THE COUNTRY DOCTOR, is fortunately one of the former, a French film that shows us a lot about the life of a kind, compassionate, smart and now-sick-himself doctor, Jean-Pierre, who labors in a small provincial town. No spoiler here, since we learn of our medicine man's cancer prognosis in the very first scene of the film.

Then we move to his usual workday: visiting patient after patient, including his parents, and we quickly see how well he does his job. The details are terrific: specific and fascinating (at least they were for a medical civilian like TrustMovies).  As directed and co-written by Thomas Lilti (shown at right), the movie bursts with both energy and ideas. Soon, Jean-Pierre's own doctor has sent him a possible helper/replacement, a new doctor named Nathalie, who seems equally bright and caring, if a little too quick on the draw, diagnosis-wise.

The actors who play this Hippocratic pair could hardly have been better chosen. François Cluzet (above, of Tell No One, À l'origine (click and scroll way down), The Intouchables) gives another of his sterling, lived-in performances as Jean-Pierre, while the lesser-known (on these shores) Marianne Denicourt (below, of Sade and Serial Killer 1) brings to the proceedings, along with her beauty, that special skill of seeming pert-yet-deep and so immediately wins us over.

The supporting cast is made up mostly of the doctors' patients, and each one is brought to quick, sharp life. Via one vignette after another, we grow to know the life of the doctor, his new "assistant," the townspeople (and some of their concerns), as well as our hero's ongoing treatment.

If there is not a misstep in any of the details here, the movie does lose some of its earlier steam by choosing to go the feel-good route, rather than the more expected, would-have-been-more troubling-but-also-deeper route.

This is not a deal-breaker. The results here are medically believable, but they also bypass the opportunity to confront dying and death from the personal and certainly more unusual perspective of the physician himself. Too bad.

The Country Doctor, available from Distrib Films US, makes it DVD debut via Icarus Films Home Video this coming Tuesday, July 25, available for purchase and/or, one hopes, now or eventually rental and streaming.