FILM
Review: The Barbarian Invasions
In “The Decline of the American Empire” (1986), the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand created a companionable erotic fiction. A group of university intellectuals gathered at a lakeside house outside Montreal for a weekend of food, gossip, and sex. These academic folk—the women as well as the men—were ebullient talkers and boasters who loved to fool around. Rémy (Rémy Girard), a boisterous philanderer, was at the center of the group, surrounded by his wife, two of his former mistresses, and male friends both straight and gay. In Arcand’s new film, “The Barbarian Invasions,” Rémy, now in his fifties, is dying of cancer in a Quebec hospital. His wife, fed up with his unending infidelities, threw him out years ago, but she still guards his morale, and she summons their son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), from London to be with his father. The two men, it turns out, don’t get along. As a boy, Sébastien never had much attention from Rémy, and Rémy is furious that Sébastien—a sleek, wealthy investment banker—turned his back on the intellectual passions that animated him and his friends. “If only he would read one book—just one!” Rémy thunders from his bed, and when the two meet they can hardly talk to each other—they break into spitting rages in front of an aghast nun who goes around the hospital handing out holy wafers.
Rather mysteriously, Sébastien—out of loyalty to his mother, perhaps, or suppressed love for his noisy reprobate of a dad—begins to arrange for Rémy’s comfort. In the crowded, state-run hospital, he gets his father a quiet room, bribes some union thugs to spruce it up, and then summons from the four corners of the globe the gang of friends who appeared in “Decline.” The hospital room becomes the site of an ongoing party: sexual memories, bawdy jokes, regrets, and political tirades bang off the walls at all hours. Eventually, the group moves to a house near the one that was the setting for “Decline,” and, as Rémy grapples with the failures and satisfactions of his life, the movie quiets down and ends with great gentleness. “The Barbarian Invasions” might be called an idyll of death. Without excessive sentiment (but without slighting sentiment, either), Arcand does his best to sum up. What was Rémy’s life about? And what can he pass on to the next generation?
Most movies are inarticulate. Arcand’s movies are hyperarticulate. At times, he’s given to a rather facile owlishness, and I’m not quite sure how to take the numerous references to literature and history—are they meant to be signs of erudition or a case of reflexive name-dropping? But it’s obvious that Arcand loves these characters, even though he lets us know that none of them are single-minded and disciplined enough to achieve anything lasting. Their real gift, we gather, is for friendship and for the sort of sexual badinage that is close to infantile but also joyous and ripe. “The Barbarian Invasions” comes out of an intellectual culture more candid, demonstrative, and uninhibited than our own.
Rémy is an old-fashioned Marxist freethinker, an anti-clerical radical humanist who is capable, at death’s door, of berating the sweet-natured nun for Pope Pius XII’s misdeeds during the Second World War. This blathering hedonist has never worked very hard, but he’s not too sorry about it, since he’s always had such a good time. Rotund and bespectacled, he’s the kind of ordinary-looking man who gets women into bed because he loves and needs them so much, and women respond to his flirtatious adoration—he’s a rogue, but easy to forgive. Sébastien, however, who has defined himself in opposition to Rémy, can’t let go of his anger. Stéphane Rousseau is well known in Canada as a standup comic and singer, and he gives a fascinatingly minimal performance as the brilliant young financier. We can’t quite tell what makes Sébastien tick, but we suspect that his resistance to his father’s slovenly appetites has him all balled up, and that he dispels his unhappiness with extraordinary bouts of industry.
Arcand is trying to work out his ambivalent feelings about a world under threat. Is such a world worth passing on or not? Is the empire really “in decline”? The terrorists may have struck the World Trade Center (we see the events on TV), and the next generation doesn’t read (the one genius in this movie about intellectuals never cracks a book). Yet the invading barbarians (both the terrorists and the non-readers) are still a long way from destroying the United States—indeed, the Canadians have to cross the border and go to the heart of the empire just to get first-rate medical treatment. In an oblique way, the movie is a rueful salute to the infinite energies of American capitalism. Rémy the old radical can’t change the world; he never could. But he can change a few of the young barbarians. One of Sébastien’s most humane acts is to befriend a former schoolmate, Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), who has become a beautiful, sad-eyed junkie, and she procures a supply of heroin to ease the suffering of Rémy’s final hours. Rémy’s reconciliation with Sébastien, even though we can see it coming, is extremely moving. His connection with Nathalie is more spiritual than emotional; his modest regrets over his pleasantly wasted past link up with her despair over the future. After all the noise and the jokes, Arcand works with exquisite tenderness when he brings these two together, and, at the end, Nathalie is left alone, like Alice in Wonderland, in Rémy’s book-lined study, a room filled with the intellectual treasures of the Western world.
Review: The Barbarian Invasions
In “The Decline of the American Empire” (1986), the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand created a companionable erotic fiction. A group of university intellectuals gathered at a lakeside house outside Montreal for a weekend of food, gossip, and sex. These academic folk—the women as well as the men—were ebullient talkers and boasters who loved to fool around. Rémy (Rémy Girard), a boisterous philanderer, was at the center of the group, surrounded by his wife, two of his former mistresses, and male friends both straight and gay. In Arcand’s new film, “The Barbarian Invasions,” Rémy, now in his fifties, is dying of cancer in a Quebec hospital. His wife, fed up with his unending infidelities, threw him out years ago, but she still guards his morale, and she summons their son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), from London to be with his father. The two men, it turns out, don’t get along. As a boy, Sébastien never had much attention from Rémy, and Rémy is furious that Sébastien—a sleek, wealthy investment banker—turned his back on the intellectual passions that animated him and his friends. “If only he would read one book—just one!” Rémy thunders from his bed, and when the two meet they can hardly talk to each other—they break into spitting rages in front of an aghast nun who goes around the hospital handing out holy wafers.
Rather mysteriously, Sébastien—out of loyalty to his mother, perhaps, or suppressed love for his noisy reprobate of a dad—begins to arrange for Rémy’s comfort. In the crowded, state-run hospital, he gets his father a quiet room, bribes some union thugs to spruce it up, and then summons from the four corners of the globe the gang of friends who appeared in “Decline.” The hospital room becomes the site of an ongoing party: sexual memories, bawdy jokes, regrets, and political tirades bang off the walls at all hours. Eventually, the group moves to a house near the one that was the setting for “Decline,” and, as Rémy grapples with the failures and satisfactions of his life, the movie quiets down and ends with great gentleness. “The Barbarian Invasions” might be called an idyll of death. Without excessive sentiment (but without slighting sentiment, either), Arcand does his best to sum up. What was Rémy’s life about? And what can he pass on to the next generation?
Most movies are inarticulate. Arcand’s movies are hyperarticulate. At times, he’s given to a rather facile owlishness, and I’m not quite sure how to take the numerous references to literature and history—are they meant to be signs of erudition or a case of reflexive name-dropping? But it’s obvious that Arcand loves these characters, even though he lets us know that none of them are single-minded and disciplined enough to achieve anything lasting. Their real gift, we gather, is for friendship and for the sort of sexual badinage that is close to infantile but also joyous and ripe. “The Barbarian Invasions” comes out of an intellectual culture more candid, demonstrative, and uninhibited than our own.
Rémy is an old-fashioned Marxist freethinker, an anti-clerical radical humanist who is capable, at death’s door, of berating the sweet-natured nun for Pope Pius XII’s misdeeds during the Second World War. This blathering hedonist has never worked very hard, but he’s not too sorry about it, since he’s always had such a good time. Rotund and bespectacled, he’s the kind of ordinary-looking man who gets women into bed because he loves and needs them so much, and women respond to his flirtatious adoration—he’s a rogue, but easy to forgive. Sébastien, however, who has defined himself in opposition to Rémy, can’t let go of his anger. Stéphane Rousseau is well known in Canada as a standup comic and singer, and he gives a fascinatingly minimal performance as the brilliant young financier. We can’t quite tell what makes Sébastien tick, but we suspect that his resistance to his father’s slovenly appetites has him all balled up, and that he dispels his unhappiness with extraordinary bouts of industry.
Arcand is trying to work out his ambivalent feelings about a world under threat. Is such a world worth passing on or not? Is the empire really “in decline”? The terrorists may have struck the World Trade Center (we see the events on TV), and the next generation doesn’t read (the one genius in this movie about intellectuals never cracks a book). Yet the invading barbarians (both the terrorists and the non-readers) are still a long way from destroying the United States—indeed, the Canadians have to cross the border and go to the heart of the empire just to get first-rate medical treatment. In an oblique way, the movie is a rueful salute to the infinite energies of American capitalism. Rémy the old radical can’t change the world; he never could. But he can change a few of the young barbarians. One of Sébastien’s most humane acts is to befriend a former schoolmate, Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), who has become a beautiful, sad-eyed junkie, and she procures a supply of heroin to ease the suffering of Rémy’s final hours. Rémy’s reconciliation with Sébastien, even though we can see it coming, is extremely moving. His connection with Nathalie is more spiritual than emotional; his modest regrets over his pleasantly wasted past link up with her despair over the future. After all the noise and the jokes, Arcand works with exquisite tenderness when he brings these two together, and, at the end, Nathalie is left alone, like Alice in Wonderland, in Rémy’s book-lined study, a room filled with the intellectual treasures of the Western world.
posted by D @ 10:21 AM
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