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MOVIE CRITIQUE:
"The Barbarian Invasions" is a lovely, moving, and a very interesting film about the final days of a college
history professor and a life long left wing political radical who is dying from a brain tumor in an overcrowded Quebec hospital.
The movie starts off with Rémy (Rémy Girard) still filled with anger and instantly ready to vent his spleen at all the
injustices in the world. With his hair trigger temper and volatile nature, even the Catholic Sister who waits on him in his
hospital bed comes under his withering criticism for the failure of the Popes to do anything about the Holocaust during World
War II.
However, by the end of the movie Rémy has calmed down not only because he is much weaker but also because he is soon facing
the Grim Reaper and, as a atheist, he does not know what is in store for him. In short, as he admits to his estranged son,
he is "scared."
This movie has received a great deal of critical acclaim, and justifiably so. It picked up the Oscar this year for the
Best Foreign Language Film. Film critics, the vast majority of whom are liberal in their political viewpoints, have tended
to rave about this film because they are seeing a film about one of their own.
Rémy has had a long life of supporting left wing political causes. He traveled to China in the early days after the Cultural
Revolution and raved (to his hostess, in an unfortunate situation) about the Red Guards. He hates Capitalism and does not
believe in God. He has lived a life of sexual promiscuity and now he only wishes to die in a Canadian hospital even though
it is overwhelmed by the demands of the Canadian socialist health care system.
But this film is not one to be pigeonholed as merely that of a liberal mindset, for it is just as easy for a conservative
to view this film from the opposite end of the political spectrum and come to conclusions that are 180 degrees away from those
of the liberal bent. This is primarily because this film, like "The Fog of War," does not beat the viewer over the
head with a slew of didactic arguments. Rémy, his friends around him, and his causes in life are presented without coloration
and the viewer is then left having to make up his own mind as to their intellectual justification.
Anyone who sees this film and still comes out with the notion that the Canadian health care system is superior to ours
ought to have his head examined. That system as presented in this film is a total mess on the verge of outright collapse.
Patients fill every foot of the overflowing hospital corridors. Whole floors are left vacant as there is not anyone available
to staff them. Access to critically needed diagnostic care is so far in the future that the patients who need it will mostly
likely be dead by the time their name comes up in the queue. And the market system still works in the form of richer patients
being able to bribe the overworked and under paid staff for their special needs.
Rémy has lived what some might call a charmed life of irresponsibility, especially sexual irresponsibility. And what has
it gained him? A wife and a son who detest him. His wife divorced him many years before and his son has rejected him by choosing
the opposite career route and becoming a wealthy trader in the financial district of London. His daughter sails the seven
seas as a yacht hand in her bid to escape the demands of her family.
He has done nothing with his life other than remain a history professor at one of the universities in Quebec. His students
think so little of him that they have to be bribed to come to visit him in his hospital bed.
All his life he has squandered his energy in sexual pursuits while proudly proclaiming the nobility of the intellectual
life. His library is filled with books, yet he has written none. He talks with his few friends left about the giants of history:
Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles, Michelangelo, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, and yet he has done nothing himself to advance
the course of Western Civilization.
More damning is the title of this movie, "The Barbarian Invasions," which this movie exhibits as his take on
9/11 as one in which uncouth invaders have finally made an attack on American soil. Not that he favored this attack, but that
it does exhibit a failing of the Capitalistic system.
But Rémy's take about the term is also about much than just that one occurrence. Note that the term "Invasions"
is in the plural, not the singular. He feels that much of the world, including the vast majority of his own countrymen, are
uncouth barbarians and that he and a few intelligentsia, most of whom are his fellow university colleagues, are surrounded
by the great intellectually unwashed.
And he is facing the final chapter of his vain life as an atheist. The old war time saw that "There are no atheists
in fox holes" might also be said about those who are watching their life flicker away. The comfort of a believer in a
religion with its promise of an afterlife is equally matched by its polar opposite, the terror of an atheist facing a dark
unknown and an unknowable black void.
So the Canadian health care system is a mess and its failings are equally matched by Rémy, who is a failure at life, a
failure at familial relationships, a failure at a giving love, and a man of considerable intellect who has squandered his
intellectual resources in the pursuit of numerous sexual liaisons through the years. The people who should love him, his family
and his students, don't, and the few people who do love him are only those who share in his libertine excesses.
And the joy of his final weeks in the hospital is completely and solely due to his wealthy capitalist son, Sébastien (Stéphane
Rousseau), who spreads money around like manure both inside and outside the hospital in his successful bid to make his dad's
final hours comfortable and memorable.
This is one of the great paradoxes of humanity, that you can be the worst parent in the world, and you can still be blessed
with children who love you and will do anything for you.
But the other personal paradox is, of course, that this left wing radical who detests capitalism and all that it stands
for ends up reaching a loving rapprochement with his estranged son because his son, in spite of every rationale to the contrary,
spends a considerable sum of his own personal wealth to insure that his father's dying days are filled with physical comfort
and the emotional joy of having his old comrades brought back for a final reunion.
On these scores, Rémy is blessed.
Please rest assured that "The Barbarian Invasions" is not a hopeless movie. There are many moments of great
humor and humanity in this film. Rémy shares his life with his friends, a life that, had it been deeper and more introspective,
might have been called one of a great bon vivant.
All the roles in this movie are played to perfection, but that one by an actress stands far above all the others. Marie-Josée
Croze is the beautiful actress who plays Nathalie. This poor girl is a daughter of one of Rémy's former mistresses and now
she is a junkie addicted to heroin. She still has her humanity and her brain left, but not her self respect.
She has always loved Rémy's son, Sébastien, from afar from the days when his dad and her mother were an item. Now the
gulf between them is impenetrable as he is rich and successful and he also has a beautiful and talented fiancée. But for her
bad choices in life, she might have been living in that girl's shoes.
The pathos that she exhibits during the course of this movie is heartfelt and heart rending. Your heart bleeds for her.
You wish that there could be a second chance in life for this lovely gamin, but, in her case, you know that there won't be.
Nathalie also knows this and Croze with great subtlety shows us the torment of her inner being. (NOTE: Croze won the Cannes
equivalent of the Oscar for her role in this movie.)
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MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau) is manning the trading desks in the financial district of London when his private cell phone
rings. It's from his mother, Louise (Dorothée Berryman), back home in Quebec, Canada, and she tells him that Rémy (Rémy Girard),
his estranged father, is in a hospital and it appears that it is near the end. When he asks her about what his sister can
do, she tells him that his sister is out on a sailing yacht in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Sébastien never got along with his father; in fact they are polar opposites. His father is a life long left wing radical
who used to teach history at a university in Quebec before he came down with what appears to be a brain tumor. He also was
a selfish and self absorbed man whose own needs always came first. His wife, Louise, had divorced him many years before and
had raised her two children by herself without any further help from her ex-husband. For his part, he spent his years both
before and after his marriage chasing both men and women in a life that centered around his personal sexual gratification.
For his part, Sébastien has made a great success of himself as a trader and arbitrageur for one of the large financial
houses in the financial district of London. He is newly engaged to Gaëlle (Marina Hands, who is herself well positioned as
a fine arts auction house specialist. The two of them will soon be flying back to Quebec, she to meet his parents for the
first time.
Rémy is sharing his room with another patient of Asian extraction. The hospital is a madhouse with cables dangling from
the corridor ceilings, lights missing or not being used, and patients in hospital beds lining nearly every foot of the corridor
floors. Visitors must jockey with other visitors and the limited hospital personnel, as all must try to make their way along
corridors thronged with humanity, beds, materials, and other items. All in all, it is a rather bleak and unhealthy looking
situation.
Sébastien takes one look at this mess and makes plans. He is a man of action used to taking charge and he also has the
money to make things happen. He bribes the hospital administrator to move Rémy to a large room on an unused floor one flight
below where he now rests. He bribes the union members to paint the walls and prep the room in record time.
He bribes other hospital personnel to administer a cat scan of his dad and he then pays to have the pictures sent to a
specialist in Baltimore, Maryland, for analysis. The reply is that there is no hope, none whatsoever. Sébastien wants to move
his dad to this specialist's clinic in Baltimore, but Rémy will have none of it. He wants to remain in his home town hospital
and remain with the Canadian socialistic health care system. He's true to his politics to the bitter end.
When Sébastien's computer is stolen, apparently a common occurrence in the hospital as security is nonexistent here, he
passes out the proper amount of money to assure its return. He even bribes some of Rémy's former university students to come
and visit him in his hospital room so that they can tell him how much they miss him. Only one refuses to accept the cash after
they have left his room.
Rémy gives his son a list of the names of those few people with whom has has been close for much of his life. Sébastien
notifies each of them and then shepherds them all into the room like a circus grand master.
There are two older women, Diane (Louise Portal), a lovely blonde who has "turned her engines off," and Dominique
(Dominique Michel), a buxom brunette who still lives for the sensual pleasures of life. She brags about her recent fling with
a much younger cowboy, a fact that pains Rémy as he probably wasn't a person of intellect. Both of these women were Rémy's
long time mistresses and it is clear that they remember with great pleasure the many good times that they shared together.
A fellow university professor, Pierre (Pierre Curzi), comes with his much younger and very well endowed blonde wife. The
old friends joke that so much blood is forced to flow to a woman's large breasts that their brains end up being starved for
nourishment. Two other men come back to visit Rémy in his final hours as well, in this case all the way from Rome where they
serve as foreign service attachés for Canadian university students studying abroad. They are a gay couple and the point is
made that Rémy also had a fling of some duration with one of them.
It is these quiet moments of occasional hilarity where old friends dip into the deep well of remembrances and recall the
glory days of their past. Rémy recalls a sensuous movie star who started him on his long road of sensual pleasures as a young
child. She appeared in a modest film of the day in which she only walked into the surf and pulled her skirt up to her thighs,
but this was enough to excite his sexual fantasies for years afterwards.
He is also reminded of being a father on those few rare occasions where Sébastien is able to make a computer connection
with his sister out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. All gather around when his laptop is placed on top of Rémy lying in
his bed as she tells her dad what she is doing and how much she misses him.
When the nurse tells Sébastien in all honesty that the morphine that is being administered to his dad is probably not
doing much to ease his pain, he asks her what would be better. Heroin, she answers, but the hospital cannot administer it.
Sébastien visits the nearest police station to ascertain where the drug dealers operate but they think that he is a news plant
looking for a police exposé.
Dominique later informs him that her daughter, Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), also estranged from her for many years, is
a heroin addict who lives in the city. A cell phone number leads to a meeting in a coffee house where Sébastien makes her
an offer that she can't refuse. He will pay for her drug use as well as long as she gets him a steady supply for his dad.
Soon Nathalie is burning heroin for Rémy and helping to ease his pain.
She well remembers both him and Sébastien from the days when their two parents were involved with each other. It is obvious
that this beautiful but tragically flawed young woman still cares very deeply for her childhood friend. But there will be
problems, for, as Nathalie readily admits, "You can't trust a junkie."
There are also moments of joyful poignance. The old friends all gather out at a beautiful lakeside lodge owned by Pierre,
a lodge at which they had all gathered many times before over the years. The serenity of the place suggests to Rémy that here
is where he might want to die for at least here he will be happy as he is surrounded by family, friends and a serene lakeside
beauty before he begins his final journey to the great unknown.
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