Denys Arcand’s sequel to 1986’s The Decline of the American Empire is a conceited exercise in pomposity couched in a comedy/drama about the passage of time and the inexorableness of death. The Barbarian Invasions, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film at the 2004 Oscars, picks up the characters from the 1986 film as they grow older and face health problems.
Remy (Remy Girard) is battling terminal cancer in the careworn Canadian health care system. He is living out his final days in a hospital bed painfully. Remy’s ex-wife Louise (Dorothee Berryman) convinces Remy’s son, Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau) to visit from London. Sebastien is a successful businessman with a fragile, to say the least, relationship with his father. He half-heartedly arrives, only to take charge over the situation and ensure that his father receives better care and is able to live out his final days as he wishes.
Sebastien moves Remy to an unfilled floor at the crowded Quebec hospital because most of Canada’s hospitals are filled with unfilled floors and rooms. Remy’s son is then able to convince several of his father’s friends to come and pay him a visit. Familiar characters from The Decline of the American Empire show up and we see how their lives have changed (they really haven’t) and how they come to terms with Remy’s condition.
The strength of Arcand’s films comes with the dialogue and with the vanity that each character imposes upon us. By philosophizing incessantly about their lives and how significant their experiences are, Arcand’s characters give us a sense of slick approval like only French Canadians can. While The Decline of the American Empire focused on the characters entering their middle ages, The Barbarian Invasions gives us the characters entering the “wind down” phase of life.
Make no mistake about it, The Barbarian Invasions is a dialogue-driven picture. It is filled with musings about sex, politics, faith, and superiority. So devoid of any actual struggle are these characters that a lot of the clamour seems exceedingly empty. And that’s really where Arcand drops the ball.
Instead of granting us a story of how death’s succession impacts characters filled to the brim with themselves, Arcand gives us a story about how crappy Canada’s health care is and how those with money can buy whatever they want.
Take when Sebastien bribes the union (?) at the hospital to open up the floor for his father, paint the walls, and basically complete a little suite for his all of his dad’s bumptious friends to hang out in and drink wine. Sebastien’s nature of throwing money at his problems and finding solutions deserved far more examination, but instead Arcand treats the subornment like a predetermined conclusion. In the same way, the director undercuts the use of heroin to ease Remy’s pain and, as an alternative, uses it as a progressive plot point.
In that way, the director certainly emulates his characters (or is it the other way around?). While we aren’t looking for a way to rise above the narcissism of Remy and his friends, we are looking for some strand of civilization. Instead, we follow chilly vessels through comic routines (such as the cutting of a television wire in the hospital) and we wind down outlandish subplots involving narcotics cops and laptop theft. Arcand, as writer and director, seems noticeably more impressed with the task of floating his philosophies than letting his characters exhale. As such, Remy, Sebastien, and everyone else plainly become loudspeakers for the sensibilities of the director.
So instead of progressing his characters in any distinguished fashion or impressing upon us the idea of loss in the midst of a sea of self-important assholes, Denys Arcand is more content to merely let his own interpretations of Canadian health care, politics, religion, and conceit fill the mouths of his characters.
What was once charming is now musty, insipid, and insignificant. And for a film such as The Barbarian Invasions, inconsequentiality is perhaps the greatest sin of them all.
3/10
