The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares)
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DVD details
Actor: Denis Bouchard, Dorothee Berryman, Isabelle Blais, Markita Boies, Toni CecchinatoBrand: Buena Vista Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-07-13
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Miramax
DVD Reviews of The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares)
DVD Review: Compassionate liberalism...
Summary: 5 Stars
Mirroring a climactic era of moral reversal, Denys Arcand has distilled the alternative to living a good and honorable life into a hazy Czaristic fantasy - surrounded by supplicants, oblivious to truth and pending a tragic demise. Unfortunately, there are enough stumbling blocks to understanding this movie's message that morally-challenged, cultural elitists can effortlessly misinterpret it so as to validate their own inclinations. To them, the film's hero, Remy, bumbling through life by exploring mediocrity, is a lovable cad, who gets rewarded at life's end with all the detestable things to which he has grown accustomed. The mistaken message being celebrated is that one can engage in all manner of moral turpitude, but in the end everything will fall into place - no harm done. Given his abuse of a power relationship with an intern, our former American president has done much to sensitize society's intolerance to such creatures. These days, cads are more likely to end their lives alone, betrayed, and afraid. So what's the real message?
Despite its snob-appeal, Les Invasions Barbares supports traditional values by mocking what can fairly be termed "compassionate liberalism". It's not a straightforward tragedy, comedy or farce, although there are elements of all these simple plot devices. The needed nuance for exploring this film's true meaning is recognizing that it's a compound tragedy. It maintains the elements of the classic Greek model in that the hero must die for his transgressions. Yet, the plot is infused from the beginning with the redemptive possibilities characteristic of the Yov (Job) model. Redemption starts with identifying one's failings, and that recognition is the penultimate element in Greek tragedy. But, Remy's recognition occurs in the beginning of the film, at the hospital and in the presence of his longsuffering wife. He acknowledges failures in his commitments to his wife, his family, and his chosen profession. Here the audience is left on a knife edge; it's too early to end the film by having Remy die, so we are left with the delightful possibility that Remy can use this newfound consciousness towards a redeemed future.
Any hope for redemption takes a swift detour with the arrival of the son, Sebastian, and the aftermath of Remy's self-indulgent and self-justifying outburst against him. Remy refuses to hear the very facts that support his own recent reflections. Sebastian is incapable of dealing with his conflicted and still immature father. Bowing to his mother's need to maintain family dignity, he copes by yielding to his father's false pride. Throughout the rest of the film, Remy is tortured by indecision and a consciousness of truth that bobs intermittently to the surface, only to be sucked down by internal turbulence. Too often Remy slips back, addicted to his past and to the narcotic of soothing lies that he has told himself over the years. Self-deception is the rule during a trip to the American clinic. The trip back to the hospital brings news of the judgment - disease prognosis, terminal.
From here on, Sebastian is the major protagonist, and his actions only serve to thwart any possibility for Remy's psychological rehabilitation. Not extending to his father the ability or desire to make any change, Sebastian lavishes Remy's remaining time with a mind-numbing array of deceptive gimmicks designed to assuage his father's twisted heart. These include cynically paying off Remy's students and the implied coaching of Remy's daughter, who by sailing the high seas has symbolically removed herself as far from her father's world as possible. Sebastian insincerely flings his sister's heart-wrenching productions onto Remy's eager lap. By her final correspondence, she is so overcome with regret that her actions can't match her forced spin; she can no longer face the camera (if only he could have been an honorable man). Reinforcing Remy's failure to find redemption are the ever-present societal symbols of unrepentant corruption and the systemic denials that permit their perpetuation. Chief among these are a self-serving healthcare bureaucracy and a Quebecois infrastructure rife with trade union and mob-connection lubricity. Sebastian too easily negotiates what are frustrating impediments to rational people, expertly manipulating the surrounding sleaze to his own design.
Sebastian also dredges up a rogue's gallery from Remy's past, some weary yet unrepentant loose ladies, as well as a pair of eccentric male homosexuals. As expected, leftists superficially view these extra characters in a sympathetic light, because on the surface their presence appears to help Remy. However, a mainstream audience can quickly recognize that their dialogue, rather than being uplifting, is coarse and grating. By the evening scene at the cottage, Remy's friends from the past appear to be the Devil's own harpies, whose only purposes are to reassure Remy about his past and to blind him to any self-realization. Premonitions of Remy's violent demise are intermittent news footage and analyses of the 9/11 tragedy. Similar to Remy's disease, these barbarians are striking inside the corpus. It's always understood that barbarians can only succeed after advanced moral decay. To that end, Remy's coterie of flatterers further tarnishes itself by adding to the background Bush-bashing served up by likeminded television network flunkies. Without giving away the ending, there is no moral ambiguity surrounding Remy's necessary death; the matter has been enforced by the right-minded people of Michigan, thanks ironically to CBS News and 60 Minutes (Jack Kevorkian). It is yet another stumbling block employed with immense import.
Sons regularly envision fathers in light of painfully missed opportunities, often vowing never to make the same mistakes. Anticlimactically, Sebastian narrowly rejects repeating his father's cycle of banality. On a personal note: My own dying father asked me, `why had god given him cancer, since he had always loved god'. I could have gotten angry and asked him why he thought that half of our family sacrificed its dignity by refusing to be with him. Alternatively, I could have insincerely parroted his self-pity; thus, giving him no chance or reason to reform. On this point, I chose to say nothing.
Description of The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares)
Academy Award(R) winner for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003, THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS is a provocative look at the many ties that bind a group of friends and lovers. It's not easy for a narrow-minded professor (Rémy Girard) to reconcile with his equally stubborn son. But soon, father and son find themselves gathering with their wide and colorful circle of family and friends to confront their differences, confess their secrets, and celebrate life! Winner of the Best Actress (Marie-Josée Croze) and Best Screenplay awards at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival -- critics everywhere hailed this outstanding motion picture as one of the year's best!The intriguing Denys Arcand (director of Jesus of Montreal and Stardom) returns to the lusty, cantankerous intellectuals of his first film, The Decline of the American Empire. Remy (Remy Girard), a history professor, is dying of cancer, and his estranged and financially successful son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau) returns to care for the old man. With the power of money, Sebastien cuts through bureaucracy and the law to give his father some comfort--comfort that Remy accepts with reluctance, because in his eyes the unintellectual Sebastian has betrayed all of Remy's principles. Old friends arrive and soon the conversation turns to sex, religion, history, sex, academia, sex--The Barbarian Invasions isn't very focused, but the very breadth of its ideas makes it worth seeing; few movies even try to grapple with morality or the state of our culture, let alone with this kind of intelligence and grace. --Bret Fetzer
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