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.

Alice Winocour's AUGUSTINE: the doctor-patient relationship gets a feminist slant

Maybe "slant" (see the headline above) is too strong a term. In AUGUSTINE, the quiet, thoughtful and surprisingly masterful first-full-length film from Alice Winocour (who was a co-writer on Ursula Meier's Home), we observe the relationship between the famous 19th century doctor, Jean-Martin Charcot, and his star patient, the titular Augustine, a girl in her late teens working as a kitchen maid who suffers from seizures and is taken to the hospital where Charcot is in charge. For me, this movie seemed a hugely feminist piece of art, though it never raises its voice or even speaks its theme aloud. Instead it simply shows us the state of women in the mid-1800s, particularly those in the lower class. And how, in every way, the male rules the roost, whether that roost be at work, play or in the domicile.

Ms Winocour, shown at right, captures the time, place and people with remarkable veracity and ease. She creates a generally dark piece, especially in terms of theme, and then executes this via the script (in which words are used sparingly yet count for much) and in the circumspect digital cinematography (by George Lechaptois), muted music (Jocelyn Pook) and beautiful, rich and oddly bleak art direction and production design (Arnoud de Moleron). Everything works toward the idea of repression, expected and carried out. Women were, in every way, available for the amusement, use, entertainment and experimentation of and by men. Nowhere in the film itself does Winocour tell us that her film is based on a real incident (in fact, on an entire slew of them). We grasp this, even so.

The filmmkaer has wisely chosen her three leading players with an eye for ability, class and in the case of the woman who plays Augustine, surprise. In this role, the singer/actress Soko (above, seen previously by me only in A l'origine) proves a wonderful choice. She has qualities both feral and elegant, intelligent and enormously sensual. Augustine appears initially needy, but uses every opportunity to learn and grow. She wins us over completely and does this by not trying. She never asks for sympathy and hence gets it in spades.

As Dr. Charcot, one of France's leading actors, Vincent Lindon (shown above and below, left), proves an inspired choice (though not, it is said, the first choice; that would have been Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde). Lindon does "interiority" and repression about as well as anyone, and he uses that ability here to help us understand this doctor's sense of entitlement, along with his slow coming-to-terms with his buried feelings.

Chiara Mastroianni uses her strength and her own quite special ability to indicate interior hurt to create the doctor's sadly misused wife. This woman comes from money and class and gives her husband the career connections he so needs. (Ms Mastroianni also looks sensational in mid-1800's garb.)

Augustine is open-ended, beginning in media res (ending there, too), with not everything explained or underlined along the way. Yet all you need to know -- and feel -- is here. This is a very fine first feature.

From Music Box Films and running 102 minutes, the movie opens this Friday in Manhattan at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and Film Forum, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal, Town Center 5 and Playhouse 7.