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THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
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Bespectacled bloviating Picasso-wannabe Montreal university professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is dying of Movie Disease (symptomless, readily diagnosed, inexorable, painless, and telegenic), so his long-suffering ex-wife Louise (Dorothée Berryman) summons ambitious acquisitive son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), as well as Rémy's old pomo posse, a veritable Big Chill from McGill (or Université de Montréal) that includes Rémy's "two favorite mistresses," to his hospital bedside to bear witness and say their farewells.
Daughter Sylvaine is half a world away sailing the Pacific delivering yachts. Son Sebastien, who is everything his father professes to despise – ambitious, hard-working, sober, faithful, self-made rich, Anglophile – is estranged by hostility. Yet promptly upon arrival Sebastien deploys those skills his father condemns to cut a swathe through the inept hamstrung bureaucracy and union-enslaved work force to conjure up the well-furnished cheerful private room in which Rémy will make his monologist testament.
Rémy is a curmudgeon and a bully, a J. P Donleavy Ginger Man of oral-expressive id, who does not talk so much as lecture, not so much lecture as excoriate, bashing listeners with puffed-up factoids that establish his superiority by distancing himself from brutal humanity. In his former incarnation as an urban theorist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "Society is regularly invaded by barbarians," referring to the next generation of adolescents, and Rémy speaks for his whole sensual socialist generation when he condemns his students as brainless lumps. Yet his own generation, of which he is so proud, gradually acknowledges its own shallow follies. "Was there an ism we did not embrace?" muses one. "Cretinism," Rémy tartly answers; yet the very next anecdote he tells refutes himself, when from the ivory plinth of his government-funded, tenure-cocooned academia he smugly lauded the Cultural Revolution to a young Chinese cultural attaché whose relatives did not survive it.
Seventeen years ago, Quebecois director Denys Arcand made his breakthrough (read: only successful) film, THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, chronicling these same characters (played by these same actors) at the height of their self-indulgence. Having reunited both characters and the actors who played them, he seems now to be subliminally reversing his political polarity. Everything that Rémy aggressively states, the film quietly disproves. Challenged by Sebastien to go to Burlington for a CAT scan (the only good Canadian health care is found in America), Rémy refuses. "I voted for Medicare, I must accept its consequences." If only I had done something, written something, he raves at multiple junctures, I'd have a legacy. Sensual socialism, that excuse for libertine indolence, may have gushed forth rivers of sperm (as at one point he congratulates himself) but what is the legacy of that? No character answers ….
… but the movie does: your children, and if they succeed, they redeem you.
Despite being verbally about politics (at least in the French-intellectual sense, complete with a gratuitous and obscenely trivialized use of 9-11 to make a dubious and peripheral point; viewers should simply pretend those 45 seconds are excised from the film), director Arcand deftly and gradually sidelines the politics (given the jibes he directs at Canadian health care, unions, and government spending, he may even have become a closet conservative). The movie takes forty uneven minutes to find its center, gradually shucking intellectual blather as chaff as it draws ever smaller circles of characters until finally it is just the family – genealogical and spiritual – and the dying man.
The story is so linear you could plot it with two points. As so often in smaller, more empathic movies, peripheral characters (nurse, union boss, narc, addict, dealer) telepathically sense what our protagonists need, and fulfill these desires like selfless elves, and the film slides painlessly away from any moral reckoning. Even the plot construct of heroin addiction (necessary to create a redemptive baseline for Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), another lost child in Rémy's orbit) is absolved – how wrong can shooting up be if one is fatally ill with Movie Disease?
For all that it is drenched in Boomer narcissism (the world revolves around us and will cease to have meaning, or even existence, when we are no longer in it to be served by it), in many ways THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS deliberately confounds our expectations. Throughout, director Arcand's touch grows lighter and surer, suggesting rather than sledgehammering, refraining from broad-brush political tract thinking, inviting us to take away our own messages. When it comes, the ending is unexpectedly moving, especially Sylvaine's wireless videocam farewell from the South Pacific.
Though neither great nor perfect, THE BARBARIAN INVASUIONS is wise and subtle. Reducing the story to its universals – one man, one wife, one son, one daughter – personalizes the experience for each member of its 'mature' audience (Nancy and I were the youngest people among our screening's sparse crowd), leaving them reflective and muted, thinking of those we have lost and those whom we will lose.
In memory of our friend Donna Gibson