Les Invasions barbares
**½/****
starring Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Hands
written and directed by Denys Arcand
by Bill Chambers Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire belongs to the homecoming genre of films like Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven, but its quasi-sequel, twice honoured at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for Marie-Josée Croze's performance and Arcand's screenplay), is a Muppet movie with socialists. When embittered poli-sci professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, his estranged, millionaire son Sébastien (David Duchovny look-alike Stéphane Rousseau) seeks out Rémy's Marxist friends of yore–who have more or less gone their separate ways since that momentous dinner party in 1986 and are reunited in true Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit-needs-me fashion–to be by his bedside for the old man's final days, while also scoring dad painkilling heroin from Nathalie (the plain wonderful Croze), the junkie with whom family friend Dominique (Dominique Michel), her mother, has irreconcilable differences. That the original's neo-realist gimmick of naming the characters after the actors playing them has been dispensed with for new additions to the cast announces Arcand's acquiescence to the inescapable fraudulence of motion pictures; the film's sentimentality, Arcand's embracing of it. Elements carried over from Decline are the most picayune in Invasions: Ever-intrigued by the preoccupations of the younger generations, Arcand's heart lies with Sébastien, whose story takes a moving left turn in the final minutes that looks to set-up another, more interesting continuation. Still, Arcand's narrative skills are as lumpy as Tim Burton's–subplots name-checking a cop (French-Canadian cinema fixture Roy Dupuis) and Nathalie's dealer add verisimilitude but seem to lead nowhere by accident, while the impositions of mild contempt for American culture are just that: impositions. (The barbarians of the title refer literally to they who toppled the Twin Towers, discussed in an ill-advised, Noam Chomsky-inspired interlude.) Uneven but affecting just the same, The Barbarian Invasions kicks off the TIFF on a promising note. Programme: Viacom Galas
