Barbarians, Philistines and Populace

Carol Murphy talks to Canadian writer/director Denys Arcand about culture, success, father-son relationships and his latest film The Barbarian Invasions.

Denys Arcand, writer and director of the 1989 Academy Award nominated Jesus of Montreal, has retrieved the cast of his breakthrough film The Decline of the American Empire (1987) and reintroduced them to us at the point of the protagonist's death some 16 years later. Rémy is a lecturer and a somewhat lovable letch. He loves women, food, literature, art and socialism in roughly that order. On his deathbed he is forced to confront all his habits, beliefs, friends and family. His loving ex-wife, Louise, asks their son Sébastien, who has been at loggerheads with his father, to come and visit him in Montreal from London where he works as a market trader. Sébastien is a fixer and a perfectionist who distrusts bombastic personalities. On the other hand his father and nemesis Rémy refuses to grow up and accept failure, so he clings to clichéd notions of creativity and sexual appetite. The trouble starts at their meeting at the overcrowded hospital in Montreal because as far as Rémy is concerned Sebastian is no better than the Barbarian at the gates of his cultural citadel. In parallel to the narrative, Arcand weaves an all-encompassing and intricate cultural and political diatribe on socialism and suffering. This is very serious comic filmmaking!

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 96