By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * *)
The Big Chill for grown-ups in a post 9/11 world, this perfectly judged Quebecois comedy of manners, which won the Oscar for best foreign film as well as acting and screenplay laurels at Cannes, revisits the characters of the director's 1986 film Decline of the American Empire.
Though it's not necessary to have seen that film to enjoy this one, it doubtless deepens the appreciation of a movie which explores with acuteness and not a trace of hectoring preachiness one of the sharpest ironies of our age: that the rebels of the 60s have spawned a generation equally hostile to all their parents held dear.
The notion is captured in a line delivered by Remy (Girard), a Montreal history professor, the ladies' man of the earlier film, who lies dying of cancer in an ill-equipped, chaotically dysfunctional hospital ward.
"My son," he says to a nurse, referring to the immaculately suited young man who has just turned up, "is an ambitious and puritanical capitalist; I have always been a sensual socialist."
He's right, of course, but the film has much more in mind than such obvious contradistinctions. What makes it more than simply a talky rumination on how things change is the writer-director's sensitivity to the complicated jumble of remembered resentments, good intentions and missed opportunities that constitutes human (and particularly family) relations.
Remy's son, Sebastien, a London-based financier and futures trader, is played by a comedian (Rousseau) making his screen-acting debut and he repays the director's faith, turning in a textured portrait of a rueful son, prodigal in his own way but returning to express his love for his father in the only way he knows how.
When he learns a whole floor of the under-funded hospital is empty, he bribes a corporate-speak-spouting manager and corrupt union officials to set his father up in uncrowded comfort. He ignores the dying man's howls of protest ("I voted for Medicare, and I'll accept the consequences," he says) and he shows a similar pragmatism when he seeks out and commissions a young heroin addict (Croze, who won best actress at Cannes) to organise some illegal but effective analgesia.
As the father-and-son story plays out, the film picks up the disparate threads of Remy's friendships, many of which date back to Decline. He assembles them at a lakeside cabin where Remy, now precisely medicated, goes to die and they wryly recall the ideological fads of their salad days: Quebecois separatism, Marxism, structuralism.
"Was there an 'ism' we didn't worship?" asks one. "Cretinism," jokes another and it's left to Remy to point out the "great cretinism" with which he told visiting Chinese academics whose lives had been destroyed by communism how much he admired the great achievements of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
It's that breadth of vision, that generosity of spirit, that sense of the endless complexity and ineffability of human affairs, that distinguishes this marvellous film. Arcand is happy to draw a bead simultaneously on venal unionists and intellectually lazy academics. The title's invading barbarians are the 9/11 bombers (Remy refuses his son's offer to transfer him to an American hospital by saying he doesn't want to be "murdered by rabid Mohammedans") but they are also the capitalists who have destroyed the naive mid-century dreams. Arcand and his wonderful ensemble don't take sides and they don't expect us to, either.
CAST: Remy Girard, Stephane Rousseau, Marie-Josee Croze, Marina Hands, Dorothee Berryman, Johanne Marie Tremblay, Pierre Curzi, Yves Jacques, Louise Portal, Dominique Michel
DIRECTOR: Denys Arcand
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes RATING: R16, offensive language, drug use, sexual themes.
SCREENING: Opens at Academy on Thursday
The Barbarian Invasions
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