The
Barbarian Invasions
Dir: Denis
Arcand
Programme
Notes
Rémy, self-styled hedonist and "sensual socialist", is dying. His alienated son, Sébastian, international banker and "arch-capitalist" reluctantly visits. Sébastien has the wherewithal to grease various palms, ensuring that his father gets a private room and, via childhood friend Nathalie (Croze), a supply of heroin for pain relief.
Denys Arcond tells his story with such delicate wit and delight that this film is a treasure. The targets are numerous - hospital bureaucracy, union corruption, the crumbling welfare state, the Roman Catholic Church, the dumbing-down of Western societies, even Godard's Maoist tendencies (which got in the way of Rémy's tryst with a Chinese woman). There's a memorable sequence where Sébastien visits a police station to enquire about the best area in town to buy illegal narcotics and an appealing ruefulness in the way the middle-aged characters, Rémy's friends and mistresses, look back on the belief systems they adopted to explain the world.
The actors are old time collaborators from Arcond's prequel to Barbarians, Decline of American Culture, (don't worry, you don't need to have seen this) and their enjoyment is key to the film's humour. Yes, there is sadness, addiction and death, but mainly this is a film about warmth and laughter and sheer perversity of humanity. A pleasing Oscar™ winner.
AG
Chicago Sunday Times
December 21, 2003
BY BARBARA SCHARRES
"The Barbarian Invasions" is probably the funniest film in recent memory to make its audience cry. A love-it or hate-it phenomenon of this year's Cannes International Film Festival, this surprising combination of comedy and tearjerker had hardened industry types and critics alike snorting into tissues and sobbing just as heartily as they laughed all the way through the story of an unrepentant bon vivant dying of cancer, attended by his ex-wife, estranged son and the longtime friends who are his former colleagues, lovers and rivals in love.
"Tears were never a part of my vocabulary," said Canadian director-screenwriter Denys Arcand, best known for films including "Jesus of Montreal" (1989) and his Academy Award-nominated hit "The Decline of the American Empire" (1986).
"I've been making films all my life, and I've mostly been considered cynical,
cold and more, and then I wrote this script; I cried shooting the film, and
my editor cried editing it, and the first people I showed it to cried like crazy.
I don't know why or how I did it, but this film touches people."
The quality that Arcand describes as the "magic of sadness" that pervades
"The Barbarian Invasions" (now playing in Chicago) was in evidence
from the first day of production. Preparing to shoot a scene in which the dying
man's daughter delivers a loving message to her father via satellite link, Arcand
said, "I was on this sailboat in the northern Atlantic off the coast of
Halifax. The actress turned to the camera saying the lines -- I had written
these lines so there were really no surprises -- but the way she said them,
what it meant, just got to me. I found myself weeping great, fat crocodile tears.
I've never made a film like that."
In Cannes, meeting the press after the international premiere, Arcand said,
"I wanted to make a film about a man facing his death," A two-year
struggle to find the right tone for the script was resolved when he began to
imagine "The Barbarian Invasions" as a sequel to "The Decline
of the American Empire," with a story centered around the group of characters
he first brought to life in that film: feisty, opinionated French Canadian intellectuals
with a taste for good living and a weakness for adultery. "I wanted not
so much to turn it into a comedy, but to add a levity to it," he clarified
in a subsequent interview last week. "All those years that I tried to write
the script about this subject I was coming up with very bleak, despairing, dark
scripts, which I didn't care for much, because my idol has always been Chekhov
-- he can talk about something very serious, but with a certain kind of smile.
I was trying to get to that tone when the idea struck me of going back to these
characters that I'd used 17 years before. With them I was able to have that
lightness of tone that I was looking for."
Celebrated through much of his career as a social satirist who frequently launches his comedy into the metaphysical realm, Arcand has a genius for milking the obvious and making it work. In "The Crime of Ovide Plouffe" (1984), he had an insurance-fraud bomber conceal the deadly device in a statue of the Virgin Mary, a detail guaranteed to resonate with his hometown audience in largely Catholic Montreal. In "Jesus of Montreal," an unemployed actor hired to refurbish a wheezy devotional play for a church pageant finds himself re-enacting the passion of Christ for real in modern day Canada, with a predictably violent conclusion.
In "The Barbarian Invasions," Arcand lampoons Canada's health care system, among other targets, depicting a chaotic hospital staffed by doctors and nurses sporting a touch of the buffoon. In scathing caricatures, Arcand depicts hospital administrators and union officials gleefully on the take. "Comedy deals with the obvious," he said. "There's an element of fearlessness you have to have in order to pull it off. The rest is mystery, because you never know why it works or why it doesn't. I go from madcap comedy to absolute tragedy, sometimes in one scene, or sometimes in two scenes back to back. I've always worked like that; it's my style. It's always worked, so why mess with a good thing?"
Key to setting "The Barbarian Invasions" in motion with the gathering of the now-scattered friends at the deathbed of Remy, wisecracking history professor and profligate father, was the creation of a catalyst in the form of his son Sebastien, a financial markets analyst, who dutifully but none too happily flies in from London to manage his father's care. While Arcand poses an enormous gap between the calmly aggressive business-world thinking of Sebastien and the self-absorbed hedonism of his father's generation, he insists that the film is not about the generation gap. "I don't write about generations. I don't care about generations," he said. "I write about people I know. I don't know if it's an accurate portrait of a generation, and I don't care."
Arcand tapped into his own experience to give the central relationships of "The Barbarian Invasions" an emotional reality that so clearly rings true with the audiences the film has encountered so far: "When you get to be a certain age, you lose your mother and father. I accompanied my mother and father in hospitals and saw them die, both of them. That's a very, very powerful thing in your life.
"In my personal case, my father was a navy officer, and he didn't like filmmaking; he didn't like films at all because he thought they were cheap entertainment for the masses. If you're a filmmaker, never being able to get some form of recognition from your father is always a little difficult. In the end, when my father was dying, I came out with 'The Decline of the American Empire,' which was a big success and up for an Oscar. My father's friends came to him and said, 'You should be proud of your son; this is great what he's doing.' At the end he saw that maybe I was doing something that was valid, something interesting that people would enjoy, but this came at the very end. So the relationship between the son and the father in 'The Barbarian Invasions' is molded after what I did with my father."
Arcand is philosophical on the question of whether "The Barbarian Invasions" might repeat the international success of "The Decline of the American Empire." "I hope it's going to play well, and I hope people like it," he said, "but whatever happens with this film, it's not going to change my life at age 62. When I did 'The Decline of the American Empire,' I was 45, and success was very important for me, because it meant I could avoid television hell for the rest of my life. It was either success or [directing] miniseries until the end of time, which for a filmmaker is the seventh circle of hell.
"Every character is myself, a part of me; they all speak for me," Arcand said. Like his characters of "The Barbarian Invasions," he's outspoken, pragmatic and funny, preferring the long view of history in explaining the film's title: "There are several invasions," he said. "One of those is disease, and we are now facing large international pandemics -- SARS, AIDS; you have immigration-people crawl over everything to reach other countries; you have military attacks. We're going to live with these more and more.
"The U.S. dominates the whole world; we are all subjects of the American
empire, whether we like it or not. Some people find this reality more cruel
than others. If we are indeed subjects of the American empire, then the empire
itself will decide what our culture will be. Once it was the Roman legions;
now it's the American legions."
Barbara Scharres is director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center.