Could one speak of medical realism? Tirez la langue, mademoiselle tells the deceptively simple story of two doctors who are also loving brothers and end up falling for the same woman, their patient’s mother. What will be offered to our eyesight and our hearing though is not a clinical analysis of the characters through the procedures of an over-rigorous formal program, but rather a loving, candid, soft gaze set upon the surface of their emotional struggles. That is to say we are far from Flaubert and close to John Ford’s Doctor Bull, as Ropert’s film aligns itself into a very particular type of medical realism enabled by cinema’s virtues, one very distant from that permitted by 19th century literary conventions. Ropert wears her forebearers on her sleeve and rejoices in shaking up tones in a way that strikes the viewer, again, in a McCareyian fashion: the doctors’ story is as prone to laughter as it is to tears. Likewise, the great tradition Ropert admires lives on in her specific way of snubbing psychology and naturalism through a deep confidence in tropes and their surfaces: she makes of the characters little more than what their duties oblige them to be. They are doctors, and brothers, nothing more; a mechanism that allows the film to move us by way of its other qualities. Ropert is not working mise en scène from the precise, almost mathematical obsessions of Bozon or Emmanuel Mouret, so these virtues are instead crystallized in the unfolding of the narrative, the witty dialogues, the gestures with which the actors convey them; and, ultimately, the pleasure derived from the conjunction of both.
To sum things up, Boris Pizarnik (Cédric Kahn), the coarse brother, falls in love with Judith Durance (Louise Bourgoin), the mother of their diabetic girl patient, quietly, as is his way, after Judith makes some advances on him. Then Dimitri Pizarnik (Laurent Stocker), the timid figure, falls in love with her too, out of his own advances, when she seems interested and understanding over his alcoholic condition. Dimitri, as extrovert as he is, tells Boris he is in love with Judith when Boris is already well on his way through his own romantic enterprise, and Boris chooses to remain quiet about it. As expected, Judith and Boris are eventually caught red-handed by Dimitri. The rupture begins and the two doctors end up splitting. Eventually Judith goes back to her ex-husband and Boris, heartbroken, chases after Dimitri in what is the film’s most striking scene, a dim-lit embrace between two brothers who had been all along, we now know it, caring for each other. It is evident Ropert’s universe is a moral one, but putting aside that critical cliché, the doctors’ predicament, made explicit through the choice of their profession, brings forward one of the keys to Ropert’s poetics, what all through her oeuvre regulates both the stories and the formal procedures through which they are conveyed: the notion of taking care.
Just as one brother was fundamentally a patient to the other, Judith exists as a character only in relation to her condition as a mother who’s taking care of her daughter, little sick Alice, and in a similar way Simon Wolberg (François Damiens), in La famille Wolberg (2009), a father and a mayor at once, is but a caretaker, for his town and his family. In Ropert’s films hardly a single egotistical character exists, even if at times these characters’ profound caring is hidden away under the shroud of confidentiality. The secret, something very dear to her cinematic constellation and shared by all her characters, is such because its bearers are mindful not to hurt somebody else by revealing it. In her last film, La prunelle de mes yeux (2016), this system of caring and secrecy is what fuels the narrative device, as it becomes even more complex and reaches new heights of dynamism through the intricacy of the scénario. In the small universe of a Parisian arrondissement Léandro Papagika (Antonin Fresson) takes care of his brother Théo (Bastien Bouillon) by not telling him how bad he is at playing the bouzuki; neighbor Marina (Chloé Astor) takes care of her sister Élise (Mélanie Bernier) because she is blind; blind Élise takes care of Marina’s cocaine addiction; and Théo, head over heels in love with Élise and supposedly struck by blindness too, takes care of her by not revealing the secret of having made up a terrible illness to approach her in the first place. Just as how the characters hide aspects of themselves to their loved ones, so does Ropert’s mise en scène caringly hide from our view a portion of their hearts, only to be revealed subtly at the exact, inevitable and glorious moment when all emotion collides. Such grand instants alternate gracefully with the more apparently insignificant situations they are mostly made up of — Ropert has a predilection for showing her characters at work, as well as going to or coming back from it. And just as her adherence to “classical” storytelling is less of a reactionary opposition to “radicalism” than a modest way for her to provide the care her characters and their inner turmoil secretly need, the humble questions her films tend to pose are far from the big statements so dear to current cinema. But unassuming is, of course, far from unimportant: what these films are after is the queries of the heart — what could possibly be larger than that?