Rémy, Hero
Evidently, the French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand has a tremendous capacity for dividing the art-movie crowd. Arcand’s fans see him as a vibrant wit with a supple mind, capable of juggling many ideas at once and spicing his quirky analyses of contemporary society with playful asides and clear-eyed satire. Detractors see him as a pretentious baby boomer lost in some pseudo-intellectual forest. Want to risk a fight at the popcorn stand? Just bring up, say, Arcand’s 1989 film Jesus of Montreal, in which he took on religious hypocrisy and crass commercialism.
The faithful can now look forward to another encounter with Rémy (Rémy Girard), the talkative, free-thinking Marxist philanderer they first met in 1986, in Arcand’s much-debated The Decline of the American Empire. In The Barbarian Invasions, the old rogue Rémy is now in his late fifties, retired from university teaching and burdened with a view of the twilight: He’s dying of cancer in a Quebec hospital. This will be welcome news, I suppose, for Arcand haters. For the rest, it presents an opportunity to revisit some old issues — sex, friendship, politics to name a few — and to grapple with new ones like family reconciliation, memory and death. Arcand wades into the big questions with uncommon fearlessness.
Rémy’s long-suffering wife, Louise (Dorothé e Berryman), has long since divorced him, but her affection has survived his infidelities. Now that he’s dying, Louise calls their son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), a well-tailored investment banker living in London, to his father’s bedside. They have been oil and water for decades. Nonetheless, the angry son and the unyielding father try to make final peace, and the uncertain, painful process turns into something tender and unexpectedly funny.
Sébastien installs his sick father in a private suite on an uninhabited floor of the teeming public hospital, then invites Rémy’s old friends — the same collection of big talkers, big eaters and confirmed hedonists who gathered around him in Decline — to one last blowout in his room. The rowdy group, including Rémy’s ex-wife, two of his former mistresses and a some longtime male friends, jabber on about sex, the life of the intellect, and the world as they once knew it. Rémy is the centerpiece, still the radical full of vivid and unbending ideas, and Arcand does his best to take the final measure of his protagonist’s life.
Meanwhile, the resourceful son enlists an old childhood friend, Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), to score some bags of pure heroin to alleviate Rémy’s pain. That young Nathalie is now a junkie on the edge of death herself gives an added jolt to the film.
Arcand’s showy references to assorted literary theories and modes of political thought can be irksome, but The Barbarian Invasions gives us the kind of pure emotion we haven’t seen from him before. Arcand loyalists are bound to miss Rémy, but even the antagonists will have to admit that he goes out in style.
