Review
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
Starring Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau and Marie-Josée Croze
Written and directed by Denys Arcand
Opens Friday, December 19
Globe Cinema
All things must come to pass, and each of us will be forced to reckon with our own mortality, to reflect upon the life we’ve led when our demise becomes more imminent than inevitable.
Surely enough, celebrated Québécois writer-director Denys Arcand uses just this scenario to merge politics, character and history in The Barbarian Invasions, the much-ballyhooed sequel to his 1987 masterpiece The Decline of the American Empire. The sequel picks up 15 years after the original, with unrepentant bon vivant Rémy (Rémy Girard) living out his last days in the cancer ward of a Montreal hospital. Although Rémy wants to die as well as he lived, his wishes are complicated by his estrangement from his successful venture-capitalist son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau) – and an exhortation from Rémy’s doting ex-wife, Louise (Dorothée Berryman), is required to bring Sébastien home to Rémy’s deathbed.
This strained father-son relationship provides the emotional crux of the picture, as well as much of its witty repartee, but it’s also just one element of Arcand’s wider agenda. Realistically, the resentments between Rémy and Sébastien are rooted in long-festering personal conflicts, but these are compounded by their respective values. Rémy’s old-guard socialism runs up against Sebastien’s opportunistic neoliberalism at every turn, suggesting that, as well-defined as these characters may be, they are also representative of societal forces that are larger than either of them.
Specifically, Arcand pits these two individuals against each other in order to satirize the triumph of consumer capitalism in Western societies, at the same time taking a wistful poke at the irrelevance of humanitarian socialism. In this new commercial milieu, literally everything is for sale, and it is little wonder that Rémy calls his son "the prince of the barbarians." Never mind that Sébastien uses his unhindered cash flow to afford his father every palliative comfort that money can buy – regardless of the law’s prohibitions.
Along the way, The Barbarian Invasions details contemporary political corruption, the horror of a declining health-care system, the absurdity of narcotics enforcement and the widening gap between Rémy’s generation and Sébastien’s. As a lamentation for the passing of a way of life, the film shows us that the ideal of a free and equal society has been replaced by the ideal of a free market. In a country where neoliberals like Paul Martin and Jean Charest have already stormed the gates, the timing of the film’s release couldn’t be better.
For one thing, there are dissenting voices in this milieu that, no matter how meek they may be, are the source of some optimism. Ironically enough, the most compassionate character is Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), the junkie with a heart of gold who spikes Rémy’s veins with heroin when his pain eclipses the effects of hospital morphine. Croze won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this performance, and it’s not difficult to see why, as Nathalie represents the embattled idealism of a younger generation. When she manages, however briefly, to break through Sébastien’s cool exterior, it suggests that we need not despair just yet.
Finally, as The Barbarian Invasions progresses toward its inexorable conclusion, there is, of course, the reunion of Decline’s cast members around Rémy. This opens the film to criticisms of sentimentality, but how could a story about a dying man, especially one as vivacious as Rémy, not be at least a little sentimental? It should be championed as a film that addresses questions that are, if not completely taboo, rarely voiced in our culture – questions about the fear of dying and how to die, which are also, of course, questions about how we want to live.
Given this balance of witty cynicism and hankie-soaking sentiment, I can accept that The Barbarian Invasions is designed to make me laugh hysterically and weep like a baby, often at the same time. In this respect, Arcand has said the film is specifically Québécois, but it is also thoroughly universal in its concerns – and like Decline, it has the lucidity to place the present firmly in a historical context. If only Arcand and others who share his insight were leading us into the future, we might yet have a hope. |
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