The Barbarian Invasions (2003) (AKA
Les Invasions barbares, The Invasion of the Barbarians)
The French are weird. Apparently
the French/Canadian are even weirder. This is a film
that I just didn't get. Everyone around me at the
screening I attended was sniffling and crying, but
I didn't. It just didn't have an emotional impact
or an emotional resonance with me. Perhaps I am too
in tune with Hollywood filmmaking sensibilities and
have to have my heart strongly tugged upon in order
to tear up a little. The characters here were not
worth crying over. And the film never once truly reached
an emotional high point for me. It all seemed too
intellectual and too strident to make me lose control
of my lachrymose glands.
The film begins coldly with investment
banker Sebastien coming home to Canada from Hong Kong
because his estranged father is dying. For over an
hour, Sebastien throws money around in an attempt
to appease his mother and care for his father. The
film suggests that this makes Sebastien a good son,
because he is wealthy and simply throws money around
and makes his father more comfortable. The film also,
in doing this, becomes an indictment of the socialist
system of health care with Sebastien able to buy off
unions and the hospital staff in order for his father
to have a private wing.
Sebastien also invites many of his
father's old friends to the hospital and the group
remains throughout the film, providing it with a similarity
to "It's My Party" and another recent "dying man"
film, "The Event."
But truly the most unusual aspect
of the film that emerges at this time, in tune with
the denunciation of the health care system, is that
Sebastien begins trying to buy heroin from drug dealers
for his father to use to ease his pain. This is the
film's one interesting idea and the girl that becomes
Sebastien's supplier, the daughter of one of his father's
ex- mistresses, becomes further entangled in the film's
plot and in Sebastien's life. Here, at least, the
story becomes unique and interesting.
The second half of the film is more
pleasing and less pressurized as it moves out of the
claustrophobia of the hospital setting, and away from
the social indictments it has made, and simply works
towards the climactic and inherent finale' of the
film. Here, we finally get to relax and everything
seems far more serene and emotional. Still, there
is hardly enough of an emotional resonance to fill
the vacuous void that has existed between father and
son up to this point. The film begins and ends in
a way that is almost consciously devoid of any emotion.
Perhaps the film is trying to show us how this emotional
vacuum has powered these peoples' entire lives. The
only deep emotion shown is by the daughter/sister
character and she is removed from the proceedings
via a plot contrivance that has her at sea. Still,
none of this provides much for us to glob onto in
the film. It is remarkably hard to care about any
of the characters here.
The acting in the film follows the
example given by the direction and everything seems
cold, calculated and austere. There's very little
heart here. Stephane Rousseau (a stand up comic?)
is quite bland as Sebastien but perhaps rightly so.
His character has little or no character at all. Remy
Girard is appropriately stubborn and stately as a
father who is stubborn and stately. The rest of the
acting gang, including those who play the heroin addict,
the ex-wives, the ex- mistresses and the friends (including
a gay couple) do an adequate job and seem to hit the
right notes required by their parts. But nobody except
the sister/daughter character is ever given much real
emoting to undertake.
Regardless of all this emotional
distancing, the oddest thing of all in the film is
a seemingly pointless aside about 9/11 (with a jarring
big screen image of the plane hitting one of the twin
towers) which leads to the title of the film. For
the life of me, I didn't understand exactly how this
related to the rather typical "dying father" story
we were seeing here. It was truly disquieting to see
the images of terror from 9/11 splayed across the
screen for little or no reason. The inclusion of these
images in a film released in America seemed as heartless
and as emotionally bankrupt as the plot of this film.
The more I think about it, the more
I realize that what I disliked most about this film
is that it is a cliche. We've seen this story a thousand
times before. Writer/director Denys Arcand thinks
he can make it into something new here and he may
have done that. But without someone or something to
care about such a story fails miserably, new or not.
Note:
In French with subtitles and some
English.
Arcand also has a cameo.
The film uses the same characters
as Arcand's 1986 film "Declin de l'empire americain"
("The Decline of the American Empire.")
Clips of several "female" personalities
are shown in one segment which includes Julie Christie
and Chrissy Everett.
The film won awards at Cannes and
Toronto.
Viewed
at AFF 2003
