The Barbarian Invasions

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * * )

First, some background. Denys Arcand is a French-Canadian director best known in these parts for Jesus of Montreal, a 1989 festival-circuit hit in which a group of actors put on a play about Jesus' last days and somehow the Gospel story started to come ... okay, so maybe you had to be there.

That was Arcand's greatest hit. His breakthrough movie was The Decline of the American Empire, the 1986 chronicle of a weekend when Remy Pelletier (Remy Girard), a womanising history professor with a nice line in one-liners, and three colleagues meet in a lakeside retreat with four women: Remy's long-suffering wife, a history student who pays her student loan as a masseuse, a lecturer and a feminist intellectual. It's The Big Chill for philosophy freaks who don't need a great soundtrack.

Fast-forward to a year or so back. Arcand reunites the group for his new movie, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Cannes gongs for Best Actress (Marie-Josee Croze) and Best Screenplay.

Remy, now in his 50s, is dying of cancer in a rundown Montreal hospital, tended by Louise, still devoted though he left 15 years ago. Remy's estranged millionaire son, Sebastien, is persuaded to come to his father's bedside from his London Stock Exchange job.

Sebastien bribes bureaucrats and union leaders to make up a private room in a public hospital. He takes his anti-American dad across the border to see specialists and get treatment on machines that the Canadian health system can't provide (sound familiar?).

When he hears that heroin might ease Remy's agony he gets the addicted daughter of one of his father's many former mistresses to bring it and inject it (this is Croze's award-winning turn).

Then he brings Remy's old friends for a reunion at the lodge where they gathered in the earlier film. He also bribes three students from Remy's university class to see him.

At the end all that matters, all that survives, is love and friendship. Among the older generations, but especially from a father and son who have never connected but at the end will construct a relationship.

The DVD features little apart from a lengthy French-language TV doco in which the actors — but not the director — eat a meal and talk about the issues raised in the script: vanishing heritage, bureaucracy, the power of money, drugs, family, friends and spirituality. Tres but not totally existential, then.

* DVD, video rental 28 October