Family fortunes

Remy, a French-Canadian academic of liberal bent and once omnivorous sexual appetite, is dying of liver cancer in Montreal. His son, Sébastien, is a highpowered banker based in London. Summoned by his mother - Rémy's long-estranged wife, Louise - Sébastien returns home with his beautiful French fiancée, Gaëlle. Soon the tensions between the two men resurface and Sébastien is on the brink of leaving when an impassioned plea by his mother causes him to reassess his filial obligations.

What follows is nothing less than the stage-managing of Rémy's exit, as Sébastien sorts out terminal care for his father: bribing hospital administrators to set up a private room, scoring illegal heroin to ease his father's pain, and summoning Rémy's coterie of old friends for a final house party at the lakeside retreat where they all used to weekend. When Rémy's fear and distress become too much to bear, it's Sébastien who facilitates his father's euthanasia.

The Barbarian Invasions is the sequel to Denys Arcand's 1986 film, The Decline of the American Empire, and for those who saw the earlier film it's an astonishing companion piece. Somewhat like Michael Apted's celebrated Seven Up series of documentaries, it allows us to drop back into the lives of people we were acquainted with years ago, and discover what's happened to them, right down to the impact of 18 years' restyling on their formerly naff hairstyles.

The first film focused on the day when Louise discovered the full extent of Rémy's philandering - including affairs with their close friends, Diane and Dominique - so it's only fitting that this one should take us through the last days of the fiftysomething roué. But even if you haven't seen its prequel, this film stands up perfectly well alone, as a chillier, older, wiser version of The Big Chill.

Rémy and his pals are not an altogether likeable bunch: wordy, as academics are wont to be, selfregarding, and overly preoccupied by what is between each other's legs. But it's Arcand's skill to mould this human material so as to model the totality of the human condition, and express the bittersweet character of interpersonal relations in a godless world.

Rémy inveighs from his bed in the overcrowded hospital against the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, bringing a long-suffering Sister close to tears. He fatalistically accepts death in an inefficient health service on the grounds that he voted for it, while fending off distraught ex-lovers under the contemptuous eyes of his ex-wife. His son's girlfriend - who works for a London auction house - is called upon to value the disused sacerdotal objects of the Church in a Montreal warehouse, and pronounces them worthless. Arcand artfully composes her in a bizarre pietà: a living Madonna among a lifeless group of plastic-wrapped ones, Christ himself absent.

The Barbarian Invasions of the title are manifold: a hospital administrator idly contemplates a television programme on which a talking head fatuously regurgitates the terrorist attacks of 9/11, while Rémy himself unflinchingly describes the colonisation of America itself as a barbarian invasion, in which 200 million Native Americans died, "and there isn't even a single holocaust museum". As for the cynical narcotics detective who Sébastien encounters on his way to buy heroin, for him the barbarian invasion is the drugs trade itself, which cannot be staunched.

Arcand's earlier film analysed the decadence of French-Canadian society - and, by extension, Western society as a whole - in terms of our preoccupation with personal happiness at the expense of civic virtue. In similarly Classical tones, The Barbarian Invasions asks us to take hemlock with Rémy and face the ugly truth that the youth of Athens are ill-educated to face a world hell-bent on forgetting its own past in an orgy of senseless communication.

Rémy's abrupt slide into extinction begins in a hospital corridor choked with electric cabling; Sébastien organises his father's PET scan using email; Sylvaine, Rémy's daughter, is sailing in the Pacific, so her farewell to her father is transmitted by satellite. It's left to Nathalie, the junkie daughter of Rémy's former lover Diane, to chuck Sébastien's tootling mobile on a fire, so that he may experience his father's death unmediated by technology.

If all this sounds too freighted with philosophy to fly, believe me it isn't. Arcand's own script is delightfully fluid, his direction poised. Playing his namesake, Rémy Girard is an endearingly monstrous figure, at once pathetic and buffo, wisecracking all the way to oblivion. It was Marie-Josée Crose, as the junkie Nathalie, who picked up the Best Actress award at Cannes last year, but while she is convincingly coiled with desperation, with her perfect complexion I didn't find her a credible addict.

The rest of the ensemble are, however, all too believable as people just like us: strolling along in their quotidian lives until they step on the rake of mortality and it smacks them in the face.

The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares)
Cert: cert18

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