While the César 2022 will soon announce their winners, OCS unveils Night Doctor, a film for which Vincent Macaigne is nominated in the Best Actor category. Focus on this thrilling thriller, referenced, to discover without delay.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT ?
Mikaël is a night doctor. He treats patients from difficult neighborhoods, but also those whom no one wants to see: drug addicts.
Torn between his wife and his mistress, dragged by his pharmacist cousin into a dangerous traffic in fake Subutex prescriptions, his life is a chaos. Mikaël no longer has a choice: tonight, he must take his destiny into his own hands.
LIGHT ON A DARK VINCENT MACAIGNE
Revealed by the cinema of Guillaume Brac (A world without women) and Antonin Peretjatko (The Girl of July 14), Vincent Macaigne has marked filmgoers in recent years with his roles in Le Sens de la fête, Doubles Vies and Les Choses qu’ we say, the things we do.
And if the year 2021 saw him at the top of the poster for L’Origine du monde and This music does not play for anyone, it is his interpretation of Mikaël in Médecin de nuit, awarded the 14th Jacques Deray prize, which earned him the ultimate distinction: a nomination for the César 2022 for Best Actor. A role that almost passed him by.
Originally, the actor was to play Dimitri, the cousin of the doctor who was ultimately played by Pio Marmaï. It was while writing the screenplay that filmmaker Elie Wajeman realized his hero was right in front of him: “I saw in him the possibility that he could incarnate this type at the same time soft and violenthe explains. Night Doctor is a sort of remote adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov and I thought Vincent would be a perfect modern Platonov.”
CASTING ON ORDER
If Médecin de nuit marks the first steps (and what steps!) of Vincent Macaigne in front of the camera of Elie Wajeman, the latter finds here many faces that he knows well, like Pio Marmaï whom he had made turn in Aliyah.
Always impeccable and marvelously combining strength, delicacy, fragility and emotion in the guise of Sofia, Dimitri’s companion, Sara Giraudeau also knows Wajeman well. And for good reason, the director has signed several episodes of the Office of legends, a series which has allowed the actress to achieve wide notoriety thanks to her role as the spy Marina Loiseau, alias Phénomène.
UNDER INFLUENCES
A fine connoisseur and admirer of New Hollywood, Elie Wajeman had the great classics of the genre in mind when writing and directing Night Doctor, following a character breaking the law. “I’m thinking of Mean Streets, Le Flambeur, or Le Parrain, to name but a few. I wanted to make a film noir that would take up certain codes (moral ambiguity, debts, a woman between two men) but modernize them as much as possible”, he comments.
These are not the only feature films that have influenced the filmmaker, he who also quotes Les Forbans de la nuit by Jules Dassin, Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara and even Scarface by Howard Hawks, films that were shot very quickly. “This adrenaline, this speed corresponded to what I wanted to do, which is to say a film noir”, underlines Wajeman about Médecin de nuit, shot on his side in 5 weeks.
CONSULTATION AND EXAMINATION
Driven by the desire to reveal a dark, vibrant, oozing nocturnal Paris, Elie Wajeman was able to develop his idea by focusing his film on this doctor traveling through the capital at night. A portrait that he was able to draw thanks to a real scenario, he who followed on several occasions a night doctor he knew.
“We surveyed Paris in popular districts: 19th, 20th, 13th arrondissement. Every entry to a patient was full of suspense. I wondered each time what type of apartment we were going to fall into! And on whom!? And we had lots of surprises!“
Another major theme of the film: drug trafficking is a theme approached with the greatest realism, after the director has done a long documentary work around pharmacists and the Subutex deal: “Many bought their pharmacy too expensive, found themselves in debt, and, sometimes, not knowing very well how to get out of it, some chose to traffic. I attended two trials of doctors who were accused of having collaborated in the trafficking of Subutex.”
Night doctor, by Elie Wajeman, with Vincent Macaigne, Pio Marmaï and Sara Giraudeau, to discover exclusively on OCS.