Preview
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
Starring Remy Girard and Stephane Rousseau
Written and directed by Denys Arcand
Opens Friday, December 19
Check listings
The Barbarian Invasions was born in a hospital. Yet the birth of Denys Arcand’s latest film was far from a happy one, even if the movie itself – an alternately scabrous and sentimental comedy-drama that has become one of the most internationally celebrated Canadian films since Arcand’s own Decline of the American Empire 17 years ago – has an irresistible sense of vitality.
During an interview in Toronto in September, the Montreal filmmaker recalled how he spent days and nights in hospitals watching his grandmother, his father and then his mother all succumb to cancer. "And these were long cancers," says Arcand. "Cancers that lasted at least six months. When you see these people going down and down and suffer and suffer, you have to wonder why. And I loved my parents – they were nice, decent people. They didn’t deserve that. So this film came directly out of these nights in hospital corridors trying to get a sandwich or some tepid coffee at 3:30 in the morning and sitting at their bedsides."
These dark times made Arcand wish for a more humane kind of death, both for his loved ones and for himself. "You know you won’t get one," he says, laughing, "but you can always dream."
And films, as he notes, are made for dreaming. Arcand tried for years to broach the topic of death but always ended up with "gloomy scripts, east European scripts, Polish scripts." Two years ago he began to wonder how the characters he introduced in Decline of the American Empire might react to the demise of one of their own. This time, a script came to him very quickly and it wasn’t the slightest bit Polish.
In The Barbarian Invasions, which took prizes for best screenplay and best actress (Marie-Josee Croze) at Cannes this year, this familiar group of aging libertines and academics reunite to say goodbye to Remy (Remy Girard), a lusty old radical now dying of cancer. Age may have softened their bodies but their wits remain lively. Also on hand are some younger folks: Nathalie (Croze), the drug addict who supplies Remy with the heroin that he uses to ease his pain, and Remy’s estranged son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), a cool, steely businessman who represents everything his father abhors. Arcand resisted the idea of turning Remy’s offspring into "the usual punk in the street with dyed hair" or some other familiar totem of filial resentment. "What I found really funny," he says, "is Remy having a son who already earns half a million dollars a year, all while not reading a book and not caring about his father’s cultural values."
As in Decline, Arcand fills his canvas with a huge range of speculations and provocations. Here he takes aim at sexual mores, the drug trade, our health-care system and the failure of the "isms" that defined Remy’s generation. The title refers to the notion that the tide of immigration and the increasingly stateless nature of citizens like Sebastien are in the process of eroding America’s empire. "Seen from Washington," Arcand writes in his notes on the film, "the French, the Bulgarians or the Japanese are one and the same thing: barbarians." While Arcand doesn’t score a bullseye with all of his satirical targets, it’s exciting to have one of the country’s best filmmakers back on form. The Barbarian Invasions is rich with the swift, caustic wit that marks his best features and documentaries of the ’70s and ’80s.
Yet the most remarkable aspect of The Barbarian Invasions is its emotional generosity. "Everybody’s touched by it," says Rousseau, a comedy star in Quebec and France now making his dramatic debut. "Denys wrote such a beautiful screenplay – he’s as cynical as he used to be but a little more in touch with his emotions."
Rousseau describes how he lobbied Arcand for the role. After hearing that a sequel to one of his favourite films was in the works, Rousseau asked his friend Dominique Michel (who plays Remy’s former lover Dominique) to put in a good word for him. Rousseau realized he knew Sebastien’s situation "a little too much," having lost his mother and, more recently, his father to cancer. Like Arcand’s, Rousseau’s hospital visits provoked a creative response – as a boy, Rousseau memorized monologues and created puppets to put on shows for his mother.
"I would have paid to be in this movie," says Rousseau. "But I dug deep inside myself and found my own experience. I knew exactly what Denys was talking about. Still, even when people in my family were sick, we had good laughs. There was a lot of humour – that’s what saved us. Because if you just cry and cry, there’s no way out."
Rousseau’s memories of these times informed his performance, particularly in the scenes that were shot in a hospital. "There’s a special smell when someone’s dying from cancer," says Rousseau. "You don’t forget it. It would come back to me while I was doing the scenes with Remy."
It was a very emotional shoot for everyone. Rousseau remembers the day they filmed Remy’s final scene. "I felt very blessed being there because I saw The Decline 17 years ago and I felt like I was walking into a storybook with all these characters I knew and I was part of them now. After that last scene with Remy, Denys said, ‘Cut!’ and started crying. It was incredible to see that big guy Denys crying – and he wrote the stuff! – and to see all the cast crying. Then there were all the technicians, these big guys taking off their gloves and wiping their eyes."
Along with Remy goes the spirit of his time. No longer the vanguard, he and his pack of bed-hopping intellectuals have been replaced by the likes of Sebastien and Nathalie and their new rituals and new values. The Barbarian Invasions serves as an elegy not just for Remy but his generation.
"They’re done and they know it," says Arcand. "The barbarians are taking over and they don’t know what the future’s going to be. Remy knows he has nothing in common with his own son, except the fact that in the end, they love each other." |
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