December 5, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Denys Arcand Wants Me to Face Death
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
You who are reading this are probably young. You are lithe and strong and regardless of how much you abuse your body with drugs and booze and late night parties and sex, you are still pretty healthy. You may have a tendency toward lassitude — all those hours in front of the computer, or playing video games, or watching movies — but it will be years before your laziness catches up with you (statistically, anyway). With all the fun you are having the least thing you want to ponder is death. I know I don't.
Denys Arcand insists that you do. He wants you to grow up and confront the realities of life and death. I know he wants me to. Just the other night he almost killed me. But more about that later.
The vehicle Arcand has provided you for processing death thoughts is his new movie, THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. It may seem counter intuitive to insist that a film about illness, death, and aging is delightful, but that is the effect of THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. The French Canadian helmer's social satire is funny, moving, and passionate, all the terms that film reviewers usually trot out to codify "adult" movies for serious people. But THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS really is all those things, and more. As a wintry December wind blows cold dead leaves past my chilled window, the shaking limbs beckoning morbid thoughts and bleak memories of past mistakes and missed opportunities from my head, I think back on the film with pleasure.
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THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS concerns a history professor who is dying of liver cancer. His name is Remy (Remy Girard), and he is round, bald, and alone. His only real relationship right now is with the hospital staff nun, Sister Constance (Johanne Marie Tremblay), whom he berates with fierce diatribes about the perfidy of Popes and other failings of Catholicism.
As the film opens, Remy's ex-wife Louise (Dorothee Berryman) calls their son, who lives in London, where he is a wildly successful futures speculator. Sebastien (Canadian stand up comic Stephane Rousseau) is estranged from Remy — everyone is — but nevertheless, as a favor to his mother, he makes his way back to Montreal, model-beautiful girlfriend Gaelle (Marina Hands), who works for an auction house, in tow.
Though still estranged and bickering with his father, Sebastien soon takes charge. He can afford to. Arcand mocks the Canadian national health care system as he shows Sebastien throwing money at the problems his father is facing that are caused by a bureaucratized national health care. For one thing, Remy is confined to a crowded and noisy room. This, despite the fact that the floor below is completely empty. Sebastien bribes the bureaucrat in charge of the hospital, and then the union that controls most changes in hospital routine, in order to transfer Remy to the floor below.
In addition, the magnetic scanner that the hospital normally uses is out of date. Sebastien pays for a trip to Vermont to use an up-to-date MRI scanner. The prognosis is dire. In response, Sebastien sets about to find as many of Remy's long-scattered friends and ex-lovers as he can contact. They gather in Remy's newly re-painted and cleaned up private room to indulge in truffles and wine.
But there is an additional problem. Remy is in a great deal of pain. Sebastien's America-based doctor advisor tells him that heroin is the best painkiller. In a beautifully written scene, Sebastien goes to the cops. He figures that they would have the best information on where to score heroin. Cop Giles Levac (the great Roy Dupuis from LA FEMME NIKITA) takes the call. Levac and his partner (Julie Beauchemin) look like refugees from THE WIRE, but Levac takes on a kindly response to Sebastien's naiveté. In turn, Sebastien embarks on a journey into Montreal's underworld, his Virgil being a former childhood playmate named Nathalie (Cannes film fest winner Marie-Josée Croze, who was also spectacular in ARARAT). Now a junkie, Nathalie helps out by acquiring the drugs and then shooting Remy up.
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Though THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS doesn't come across as solely political, it is in some ways a pamphleteering tract endorsing assisted suicide. Remy cannot be saved. Instead, under the influence of his increasingly fond son, he opts to commit suicide, out at a lake house that holds good memories, and surrounded by his friends. The movie makes no bones about the fact that assisted suicide is painful for everyone involved. We are alone, and the crutch of the Church, or our alternative "isms," provides no solace. There is a meaningful scene in which Gaelle gets an assignment from her auction house to inspect the religious relics in the basement of a Montreal church, which is hoping to put them up. Gaelle is straightforward. No one wants them. For is no need for them in modern society.
Remy is a guy who embraced life with vigor. There is a nice sequence wherein Remy describes the "women" in his life: various film stars and singers he would conjure up in his mind in his youth to facilitate bedtime masturbation, women such as Inés Orsini, the star of an Italian art film called HEAVEN OVER THE MARSHES, and the singer and songwriter Françoise Hardy, one of those hot '60s chicks. There is sadness in the fact that Remy has given up that part of his life, but it is inevitable, and the movie notes the sadness of it without dwelling on it with despair.
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Miramax, in happy scissors mode as always, snipped out 12 minutes of material deemed too parochially Canadian for international consumption. I hope the footage is restored to the DVD (it will no doubt be on the Atlantis Alliance disc in its Canadian release). In any case, what remains is a fine blend of social satire and family drama with star making turns by several cast members. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS happens to be a sequel to Arcand's earlier THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. All the cast members have been gathered from the 1986 film to reprise their roles in different circumstances. I have withheld that bit of information until this point in the review because seeing the earlier film is absolutely not essential (though it might be fun) in order to appreciate the new one. But the old film and its successor resonate best in a wonderful scene in which the intellectuals, sitting outside the lake front house, chart their intellectual journeys through various doctrines, from existentialism to Marxism to Maoism to semiology to the Soviet revisionism of Solzhenitsyn. Anyone who remembers the earlier film will delight in these characters' broad self-awareness. Listening in on them is derailed intellectual Nathalie, who finds a seed of hope and inspiration in what they view as their failed intellectual treks.
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I doubt if anyone will remain tear-free during the moments of reconciliation between father and son, a generous and robust confession of love from a man who says earlier that, "My son is an ambitious capitalist prude whereas all my life I've been a hedonistic socialist lecher." But both have changed. Still, the transformation that I find the most moving is Nathalie's. As a heroin addict she faces, as she says, death every day (overdoses are common in her social set). Also estranged from her parent, Nathalie needs a gesture of unconditional trust from someone. Sebastien provides it when he offers up Remy's book-lined house to her for her use as she recovers from her addiction. On the shelves in his study she sees a copy of Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, among other titles that chart the intellectual progress that Remy and the others spoke of earlier. For complex reasons I find this, and what happens immediately afterwards, one of the most moving sequences I've seen in recent cinema, perhaps all cinema.
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It's always a horrifying moment when prestigious artists visit one's own backwater, but that's what happened the other night when Arcand visited my town to field questions after an advance screening of THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS. The next day he was to meet the press.
Arcand had occasion to visit Portland, Oregon, of all places, because Oregon is one of the few states that boasts legalized assisted suicide. I wonder how the representatives of the daily paper greeted him the next day, given that the OREGONIAN's owner is a conservative Catholic whose publication has fought editorially against assisted suicide since day one, despite the overwhelming public support of the procedure through several elections. The daily's main reviewer, however, is a man of civilization and taste so I doubt if he went for the director's jugular. The screening itself was essentially set up as a word-of-mouth event for a local coalition of citizens supporting assisted suicide, who were in attendance.
Anyway, after the screening Arcand emerged from the shadows and stood before the screen, his film having been abruptly turned off before the credits rolled. The lights also had a habit of going up and down erratically, and eventually the vile slide show that fills the screen between movies popped up distractingly behind him. There seemed to be some communications problems with the projection booth, and Arcand later gently noted that the projectionist, whom he could see through the little booth window, was losing her mind up there.
However, things weren't much better from the floor. I cringe whenever I am in the presence of my fellow citizens when they feel the overwhelming urge to talk to famous people. Their minds turn to mush. The visitor is generally subjected to a string of probably the stupidest questions he or she has ever heard. Tonight was no different. The first person, a woman sitting behind me, asked an incomprehensible question that took several seconds for Arcand to sort out. Basically, the woman confused two characters, the nun, who wears street clothes, and a nurse who figures in the plot, and she was adamant, it was imperative, she could not leave that theater until she knew if the nun and the nurse were the same person. True, the two actresses did vaguely resemble each other if you weren't paying close attention, or are vision impaired in some way. Arcand was gracious to the questioner, making a joke that the nurse, when she reappears at the end of the film, was "in her weekend clothes." But few of the other audience members evinced better speaking skills. Their sentences were filled with "likes" and "uhs" and they stopped and re-tracked their sentences, turning them into cloudy hash. One guy, though longwinded, did make a few clever points about the political positions of the film and seemed to impress Arcand, but for the most part queries were strangled sentences filled with obvious content. Arcand, who doesn't even speak English as his primary language, was more articulate than the morons and droolers in this room. They were the living embodiment of one of the sub-themes of the film, the encroaching barbarism of modern life, filled with on-coming generations of ever-decreasing intelligence.
After the film, Arcand was standing around the lobby hobnobbing with the public. He's a tall guy with a beautiful voice, and he reminded me of my old film teacher, the late Andreas Deinum. I was rushing out, but I stopped to check with a studio representative about Arcand's availability at the hotel the next morning, and for some reason the two of them fell into step behind me going down the elevator. The representative indicated that Arcand would be in the Marble Bar of the Heathman Hotel. Waxing nostalgic, I remembered out loud that that was the room wherein I interviewed Camille Paglia so many years ago. The rep asked, "Who?" I said, The author of SEXUAL PERSONAE. The representative is a very nice person, but I could see that I was losing her. This happens a lot. People just don't seem to be very interested in what I am saying. They yawn. They look away. They interrupt. They start talking to another person about something else. Therefore I was almost tearfully grateful when Arcand, hearing all this, asked me for the title of Paglia's latest book. I told him that it was a BFI monograph on THE BIRDS. He showed a great deal of interest in the book, and I was reminded that Arcand is a lot like the people in his movies, an intellectual, a great reader, a man interested in ideas. He is also a great observer. He pointed out that I was about to hit the end of the escalator where it meets the floor and go flying.
He may have been solicitous for my welfare in that instance, but only a few minutes later, the car he was in almost ran me down. Out on the street I bade him farewell and he climbed into the back of a dark-green van. I walked down the street, going north, then turned left, walking down to Broadway, the core area's main drag. Arcand's van had to navigate a series of one-way streets to drive him back to the Heathman Hotel (which, by the way, was only two blocks away). As I walked across Broadway, the green van came bearing down on me, resulting in one of those awkward situations in which you don't know whether to stop or go faster or back up or what. I imagined Arcand, in the back of the van, instructing in his civilized way, either, "Stop, you fool, you're about to hit a reviewer who liked my film," or, conversely, "Don't stop! Hit him. It's a critic!" The van stopped, so I guess he said the first thing. In other words, I now have a longer life thanks to Denys Arcand. He did not assist in my mindless suicide by car, but blessed me with yet further years to live and brood, just as his beautiful film itself invited me to enjoy life while not evading the realities of death.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Eight
One of the minor controversies swelling around KILL BILL was, "Will women want to see it?" Several reviewers cautioned against KILL BILL, decrying it as misogynistic. Internet reviewer Stephen Isaac announced that the film "degrades and devalues women at every turn. They're portrayed as vengeful, heartless beasts, bent on death and destruction. What, in fact, he's doing is opening them up to contempt and abuse."
Tarantino has countered these charges with the idea that his film promotes "girl power." But will women love it? All the women I know who have seen it liked it a lot (but then, they were all reviewers). But what kind of "girl power" film would meet the approval of the MPAA or the execs at Disney or the Christian film censors? I suspect that it would be something like THE MISSING.
Ron Howard's follow-up to the Oscar-whoring A BEAUTIFUL MIND is an "adult" western set mostly in snowy regions, like MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER and THE GRAND SILENCE. As you may know by now it's about a mother enlisting the air of her estranged father to retrieve her daughter, kidnapped by renegade Indians to be sold as whores in Mexico. It's a long and long-winded movie with an addiction to mystical mumbo-jumbo and an emphasis on fathers and daughters, reconciliation, "taking things out."
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Theoretically it should be a hit. But it's not (only $15 million as of this moment). It should be a hit because it is really in the spirit of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. That film was a suburban chick's idea of an action film. Lots of romance and un-requited love. A few fight scenes after which the battlers must "share their feelings" about what just happened. Long boring digressional love stories. "Modernist" or "adult" action in which, while still boring and predictable, certain narrative expectations are thwarted — just the satisfying ones, though.
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Is this someone's idea of what an action film should be? Is this really an alternative to the "dangerous" style and content of Tarantino's film? ALIAS has all these elements too, the parent-child tensions, post-action emotional debriefings, but it's a great show because, A), it is not boring, and B), it's not a "feminized" version of male action films, and it is not a faked feminist reinterpretation of masculine subject matter, it is a hard edged action show with a strong emotional component. So is KILL BILL. In both works, there is nobility to the emotionalism and an attention to craft in the action.
"It's mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack, not rationality," The Bride says early on in KILL BILL. This isn't strictly true, of either The Bride or KILL BILL. What KILL BILL "lacks" is the soft-centered passionlessness born of pandering to assumed prejudices of the audience. KILL BILL is instead the tightly wound, highly well crafted result of a profound and individual passion.
NEXT TIME: Guy Maddin's DRACULA
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