Irreplaceable review – good-natured country doctor drama

There’s something a bit televisual to this French movie about a well-respected country doctor with cancer who is advised to take on a student assistant to lighten his workload during chemo. Naturally, this assistant is an attractive woman with whom he has a prickly relationship. When their car pulls into various barnyards, scattering geese, I could almost hear the theme music to the BBC’s All Creatures Great and Small. But, despite some cliches, it’s a warm and good-natured piece of work, featuring an attractive, humane lead performance by François Cluzet as Dr Jean-Pierre Werner, like a younger and more restrained Dustin Hoffman. Marianne Denicourt is Nathalie, a former nurse who is taking a midlife retraining course as a medical student; a city type who – of course – doesn’t at first appreciate the patience and subtlety needed to understand a country medical practice. And she certainly doesn’t understand Dr Werner’s reluctance to hospitalise a very ill elderly patient. He is suspicious of institutions, but could it be that this reluctance is a symptom of denial concerning his own condition? Not groundbreaking work, this, but watchable.