Welcome

Welcome to My Year of Movies. My name is Duncan and I'm a movie nut. Between researching for my PhD in film history, teaching film studies classes at uni and my own recreational viewing, I watch a stack of movies. I've set up this blog to share a few thoughts and impressions as I watch my way through the year. I hope you find it interesting and maybe even a bit entertaining. Enjoy.

27 October 2010

138) The Barbarian Invasions

Les invasions barbares (2003)


Director: Denys Arcand

Starring: Remy Girard, Stephane Rousseau, Marie-Josee Croze, Marina Hands, Dorothee Berryman, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, Pierre Curzi, Yves Jacques, Louise Portal, Dominique Michel, Isabelle Blais, Toni Cecchinato


This week in Screens, Images, Ideas we did something a bit different. We left the European continent and headed to French Canada, to Quebec. We've had a bit of a focus on small national cinemas in the second half of this course and Quebec provides an interesting case of a distinct provincial cinema within a national cinema. So much of Canada's culture is defined in relation to the United States, but Quebec has its own clearly defined identity. Quebec's most highly regarded filmmaker is Deny Arcand and his 2003 film The Barbarian Invasions won him an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

When Montreal college professor Remy (Girard) discovers that he is dying from cancer he seeks to reconnect with his estranged family. His ex-wife Louise (Berryman) persuades his son Sebastian (Rousseau) to come over from London to be with him. Remy, being an academic who prioritises knowledge and ideas, has little time for his sons high-flying corporate lifestyle, but out of loyalty to his mother Sebastian uses his influence to not only organise a private hospital room and top class medical treatment for Remy, but also for his friends to come and be with him. He also arranges for Nathalie (Croze) the daughter of one of Remy's friends, to provide him with heroin to ease his pain.

The Barbarian Invasions is a very theatrical film. You can see it working quite easily as a stage production. Structurally it has a short prologue and epilogue but otherwise adheres pretty well to a traditional three act structure, with each act being largely confined to a specific location. The first act takes place in the crowded hospital room, the second in the private room Sebastian organises for his father, and the third act takes place at the lake house. It is also a very dialogue driven film. There is not a lot of action, with the interest largely coming from what is said rather than what is done.

The Barbarian Invasions is a sequel to a film that Arcand made 17 years earlier, The Decline of the American Empire. A bit of trivia, that makes it the first ever sequel to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The 1986 film, which I haven't seen, sees Remy and his academic friends come together for a meal and over the course of the day and evening discuss sex, men, women and their professional lives. It's kind of a talk-heavy, French Canadian version of The Big Chill. When all of Remy's friends from the first film arrive in the second act, even though I haven't seen The Decline of the American Empire, Arcand is so effective in creating this strong sense of relationship between them that you accept them as old friends straight away, even if, like me, you haven't seen the film in which these relationships were originally established. There is an instant rapport there which feels so authentic. Their presence really brings the film to life. The first act is quite solemn, but the arrival of his friends brings with it energy, noise and vibrancy.

As I said earlier, it is quite a dialogue driven film, and that means that the film is really dense with ideas. Arcand's screenplay explores the generational gap between Remy and his friends and Sebastian and his peers. It explores the changing of the worlds values away from the intellectual values of Remy and his friends towards the capitalist, money driven world of Sebastian. It explores the changing face and identity of Quebec. It comments on the state of Canadian health care. There are lots and lots of interesting ideas and themes being explored in this film, but they are all explored through a beautifully written, heartfelt story about a father and a son. The Barbarian Invasions is a really touching film about life and death, and about what really matters. While on the one hand you have the softening of the capitalist Sebastian whose priorities slowly shift away from work towards family, at the same time you have Remy's academic friends acknowledging that all the causes, all the 'isms' they have defined themselves by over the course of their lives (socialism, structuralism, nationalism, etc) haven't really mattered either. The closer Remy gets to death, the more of a celebration of life this film becomes. Yes, it almost gets to soap levels in terms of its emotionality towards the end, but as a viewer you don't mind. By that point you are hooked.

There is a fun little connection between this film and the one I watched yesterday, Jesus of Montreal. In Jesus of Montreal, Daniel is commissioned by Father Leclerc. He later discovers that Father Leclerc is having an affair with one of his parishioners. Father Leclerc confesses that he is not a very good priest and fears that he will be demoted from his position at the Montreal basilica if the controversial play continues. In The Barbarian Invasions, Gaelle (Hands) is an art dealer, and she is asked to inspect some religious relics that the church are looking to sell off. The person who shows her around the basement full of artifacts is Father Leclerc, played again by Gilles Pelletier. It would appear that, as he feared, he has been demoted from his position since Jesus of Montreal. Interestingly, Pelletier appears again in Arcand's 2007 film, The Age of Ignorance, though this time his character is credited as Raymond Leclerc. He is no longer a priest. It is just an interesting example of a character arc progressing through a series of seemingly unrelated films.

The joy of taking film courses, and one of the reasons I love teaching them, is that every now and then they throw up a little gem of a film which you never would have otherwise seen. If you only ever watch the movies you choose, you end up just watching the same type of movie again and again, never knowing what you're missing out on. But if you let other people choose the movie, watch things that others have recommend, work your way through various lists, do film courses, you never know when you are going to come across something you'll genuinely love but never would have seen. For a movie fan, nothing beats being surprised by a cracker of a film. For me, the film which perfectly sums this up is Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye, Lenin! It is a brilliant, hilarious but heartfelt film which I came across when I was doing this course as a student, but it is a German comedy about post-wall East Berlin, so I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have picked it up at Blockbuster of my own choosing. The Barbarian Invasions could just end up being one of those films. It'll take some time to be sure, but I was really impressed by it. It is a beautiful, touching film. Putting this together with Jesus of Montreal yesterday makes me think I'm a fan of Denys Arcand. He could just be my discovery of 2010.

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