Tweet

In a crowded hospital in Montreal and on Lake Memphremagog in Southern Quebec, a group of seven friends and lovers gather to say farewell to history professor and unabashed womanizer, Rémy (Rémy Girard) who is slowly dying of cancer. Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions reprises the characters first introduced in Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire seventeen years ago, and they come across as real people honestly searching for meaning and reconciliation. Though the film is about death and dying, it is filled with intelligence, humor, high energy, and commitment to life.

The film centers on Rémy's estranged relationship with his son Sebastian (stand-up comic Stéphane Rousseau) a millionaire London businessman. When Sebastian comes to Montreal with his fiancée (Marina Hands), years of resentment against his father boil to the surface. In spite of this resentment, however, he starts throwing money around to make his father's final days more comfortable, in a way subtly letting his father know that money can buy anything. Sebastian "persuades" hospital administrators to provide a private room for him and contacts Remy's old friends from the university and brings them to the hospital. When Rémy is released, all meet at a cottage by a lake for a group discussion and a final completion.

The Barbarian Invasions allows us to connect with our mortality and our relationships with those we care about. It is often hard to reconcile the robustly alive Rémy with our pictures of a man dying of cancer, but Girard is powerfully effective in the role and I went from distaste of his amorality to full acceptance of who he is. Though the conclusion is emotional, it is not overly sentimental, allowing us to access a deep place of silence within.

 

Howard Schumann on 28th April 2004
View all 112 of Howard Schumann's reviews