WhatzUp

The Barbarian Invasions
by Derek Neff

At the end of your life, will you be satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, whom you’ve loved, what you’ve leaving undone? This weighty question is at the heart of Denys Arcand’s wonderful The Barbarian Invasions, and it is a testament to Arcand’s honesty and depth as a filmmaker that the answers aren’t easy and comforting, nor are they wholly bleak, but like most things they are a mixture of both.

After decades of womanizing and drinking and intellectualizing, RÈmy (RÈmy Girard) finds himself alone in an overcrowded Montreal hospital, dying of cancer. RÈmy’s estranged wife manages to talk their affluent son SÈbastien (StÈphane Rousseau) into coming all the way from England to be at his father’s side, and SÈbastien comes, but only reluctantly. (Father and son have never gotten along.)

After some initial conflict, SÈbastien resolves to give his father the most comfort he can in his final weeks - he bribes the union officials and the hospital administration into giving RÈmy a private room; he finds someone who can administer heroin to RÈmy for his pain; he persuades RÈmy’s far-flung old friends and lovers to come visit; and he himself resolves to be at his father’s side the entire time.

If this sounds like the set-up for a trite and melodramatic TV movie - and on paper I guess it sort of does - then you have to take my word for it when I say that it isn’t. It’s all in the delivery, I suppose. With an unwavering gaze and an uncommonly intelligent ear for dialogue, director Arcand instead delivers a very human and heartbreakingly honest portrayal of a dying man’s last days.

The movie’s most strained scenes come whenever all of RÈmy’s friends sit around to talk. The group conversations are slightly too clever and choreographed-sounding to be convincing. But as RÈmy’s pain worsens and his fear of death increases, RÈmy dispenses with cleverness altogether. The movie’s strongest moments occur whenever RÈmy is speaking one-on-one with the people around him - with his nurse, for instance, who tries to explain why a belief in God is so important.

Perhaps the most piquant relationship in the movie is between RÈmy and the woman who supplies him with his heroin. Nathalie (Marie-JosÈe Croze) is a junkie, a smart but fatalistic young woman who is too far gone to care that she is wasting her life. RÈmy doesn’t make any attempt to reform Nathalie; instead, they talk, they share life stories and they struggle to understand their own and each other’s pain. A strange, unforgettable friendship forms between the two.

I love movies that aspire to explore life’s deeper meanings. When a movie succeeds at giving us glimpses into our own flawed humanity, we feel exalted and oddly energized. The Barbarian Invasions is not, finally, about death: it is about the love of life.