I think I may be suffering from an overload of whimsy after watching the French-Canadian comedy Seducing Doctor Lewis. In the vein of increasingly cutesy British small-town comedies, from The Full Monty to Calendar Girls, Seducing Doctor Lewis tells the story of a tiny hamlet on the Quebec island of Ste. Marie-La-Mauderne, full of hardy, working-class people who are chronically unemployed after their sole industry, fishing, dries up. The quirky residents, led by a determined old coot (Raymond Bouchard, as Germain, the town's mayor) hatch a hare-brained scheme to convince a big-city doctor to move to the town by turning it into his ideal environment, in the hope that this will somehow save their home because with a doctor, the town can get a plastics company to open a factory.
The titular doctor (David Boutin) is a plastic surgeon from Montreal, arrested for drug possession and somehow sentenced to spend a month in the tiny town. While the residents indulge his love for cricket, fusion jazz and women's feet, Dr. Lewis falls in love with the charms of small-town life and catches the eye of a local lass. The film resembles the Michael J. Fox bland-fest Doc Hollywood as much as it does the parade of Brit-coms, and neither comparison does it much favor. It's predictable, cloying and sickly sweet, and it'll do nothing but put you into a sugar coma.