The Barbarian Invasions

Synopsis: Remy (Remy Girard), a divorced history professor in his early fifties, is dying and his family and friends get together to make his final days more palatable.

There no doubt comes a time in all our lives when we realize that the crest has been passed and we begin to reflect on our achievements, or lack of them. Denys Arcand has clearly arrived at that time and The Barbarian Invasions is the result. Winner of the 2003 Cannes Best Screenplay award and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film at the 2004 Academy Awards it is an exemplary ‘art-house’ film – intelligently written and tastefully presented with a European sensibility.

Arcand is French-Canadian, but his cultural reference points are European rather than North American. Such reference points abound as he gives us a history of someone who grew to self-awareness in the time of post-existentialism and Godard, Francoise Hardy and the 60s’ sexual revolution. Contemporaries of the soon-to-be-cut-short Remy will no doubt get much from this collage of memories as they recognize in it their own experiences but the film is more than a leafing through of the past. There is also a complex interplay of skilfully-articulated characters who are all brought to life by an excellent ensemble of players (the film is a companion piece to The Decline of the American Empire,1987, which features many of the same actors) in a well-constructed story.

The Barbarian Invasions will no doubt be compared to The Big Chill (1983) which similarly involved the coming-together of a group of '60s survivors over the death of a mutual friend. Arcand’s offering is a richer film. Not that it is profound or intellectually complex, but it is wider-ranging particularly in relating the characters to their times, times which, in Arcand’s view, were far superior to the present Remy is leaving.

Whilst this is truly engaging fare, where the film does fall down, however, is as a portrait of a man dying. Arcand introduces the plot device of the millionaire son to facilitate what is a fairy-tale passage to the world beyond. No colostomy bags and death rattles here – its drugs on tap, convivial friends in salubrious surrounds and reconciliation partout.

 

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