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Even flower children eventually grow up

By A. O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Mar 05, 2004, Page 20

Cancer is the starting point for comedy in The Barbarian Invasions. PHOTO COURTESY OF CROWN

"My son is an ambitious and puritanical capitalist, while I have always been a sensual socialist."

This is Remy (Remy Girard), a Montreal history professor, explaining the relation between his bald, fleshy, libertine self and the slim, impeccably coifed and tailored young man who stands by his hospital bed. The contrast between Remy and his son, Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), who is some kind of international financier, reflects a pop-cultural apercu available at least since Michael J. Fox starred in Family Ties. The children of the 1960s, who rebelled so dramatically against their own parents, receive their comeuppance when their children turn out to be materialistic, politically conservative and sexually restrained. Ironic, no?

Yes, of course. But what makes The Barbarian Invasions much more than a facile exercise in generational conflict is that Denys Arcand, who wrote and directed it, has a sense of history that is as acute as it is playful. Later, after Remy, who has terminal cancer, retreats to a friend's lakeside cabin to die, he and his old pals mull over the ideological enthusiasms of their youth, from Quebecois separatism to Marxism to structuralism.

Film Notes: The Barbarian Invasions Directed by: Denys Arcand Starring: Remy Girard (Remy), Stephane Rousseau (Sebastien), Marie-Jose Croze (Nathalie), Marina Hands (Gaele), Dorothe Berryman (Louise) Running time: 95 minutes Taiwan Release: today

"Was there an `ism' we didn't worship?" asks Pierre (Pierre Curzi). "Cretinism," replies Claude (Yves Jacques), who has returned from his academic sinecure in Rome to ease his friend's passing. But Remy, begging to differ, recalls a dinner with a scholarly visitor from China. Wanting to curry favor with her, he praised the great achievements of Mao's Cultural Revolution, which had destroyed her family's life. "There was no greater cretinism than that," he then says, referring to his generation's soft spot for third-world totalitarianism.

Remy is, for the most part, a man without regrets, though the idealism of his youth has been replaced by a certain fatalism. At the end of his life he finds himself surrounded by old friends and former lovers, whom you may recall from Arcand's earlier film The Decline of the American Empire. That film, a hit at the 1986 New York Film Festival, was a talky sex farce situated somewhere between John Updike and The Big Chill. Now, after 17 years, the mood is a bit less raucous and a bit more somber.

Remy and Louise (Dorothe Berryman), whose marriage was breaking up in the earlier movie, are not exactly reconciled, but they are at least on speaking terms. In The Barbarian Invasions there will still be a lot of dirty talk, but the subject this time is the dwindling of the life force and the perverse habit of history to keep moving wherever it chooses in spite of the attempts by small bands of intellectuals to influence its direction.

The American empire is still, apparently, in decline (the title of The Barbarian Invasions refers to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11), but these aging radicals, living in its geographical and linguistic hinterland, bear it no real ill will. The values of American capitalism, as incarnated by Sebastien, appear to dominate the globe, but they also clearly have their advantages.

At the start of the film, Remy is marooned in the crowded ward of a hospital where the machinery seems to be broken and the kindness of individual nurses hardly compensates for the general bureaucratic dysfunction. Sebastien, discovering that the floor below is entirely empty, bribes both the hospital administrator (who babbles breathless boilerplate about diagnostic parameters and resource allocations) and the union officials who really run things.

Remy at first resists his son's help. "I voted for Medicare, and I'll accept the consequences," he says. But the younger man's money talks, and it speaks the language of filial love. Sebastien seeks out Nathalie (Marie-Jose Croze), a heroin addict whose mother, Diane (Louise Portal), is one of Remy's former lovers, and makes a deal with her. He will pay to support her habit if she will buy heroin for Remy, who needs the drug to alleviate his pain.

Arcand is at heart a populist filmmaker, but his brains are at least as well developed as his heart. The Barbarian Invasions has had enormous success at the Canadian box office, in both English and French-speaking areas, and it is easy to see why. Its humor is broad and its emotions large and accessible. But it is also, at the same time, a sophisticated and rigorous analysis of recent history, in Quebec and beyond. It is an elegy, a seminar and a long, sloppy party, full of food, wine, maudlin moments and endless conversation. Civilization may be declining gradually all around them, but they don't mind. They're in no hurry.
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