La Maladie de Sachs

The big part of the film details the working life of Dr Sachs, small town physician. One after another his patients present their bad backs, tumours, neuroses, etc, for diagnosis and, maybe, cure. Deville resolutely declines to give the audience much of a break from this litany of dis-ease. Sachs himself fills sheets of paper with his feelings of revulsion and inadequacy. An encounter with an ex-patient blossoms into an affair, and we leave the doc soldiering on, a bit less angst in his heart. Hard to say whether all this - life, love, death, the basics - is banal or profound. Either way, Deville's careful orchestration of the minutiae of routine medical practice is utterly absorbing, and Dupontel is unimprovable as Sachs. From the novel by Martin Winckler.