The Barbarian Invasions

A DVD review

Once of the nice things about services like Netflix is the availability on demand of foreign and more hard-to-find films. This would probably not have been stocked by my local Tower Video and there's probably only one or two copies, if that, at Blockbuster.

The Barbarian Invasions, written and directed by Denys Arcand, is a deft satire on the "utopia" that is socialized health care and, in parallel, the emtpy values and legacy of the radicals who won the culture war in Canada (and to some extent in the US) in the '60s.

The plot is simple - a son attends to his dying father in Canada. But the dying father (Remy) is an unreconstructed leftist college professor who we are told makes as much per year as his son makes in a month. He is also a flagrant womanizer who has used his position as a professor to bed co-eds and brags about his conquests (he brags about bedding one girl six months after his marriage). His more level-headed wife has left him as a result. Shades of a certain former President and his ever-distant spouse!

The son, Sebastian, who the father openly disrespects as the Prince of all Barbarians, is a successful London "risk manager" engaged to a gorgeous art appraiser who has, with no complaint, elected to join him to Montreal for the "fun and games" of Remy's disintegrating life.

To Remy, his son is a despised "arch-capitalist" who doesn't read anything but email and "plays video games." There something to be said about that - Sebastian's head is glued to a cellphone for the majority of the film and he doesn't seem to take any joy in life except when he's playing arcade games. But Remy pretty much thinks anyone (terrorists, drug dealers) or anything else that creates cognitive dissonance with his "utopian" delusions is a barbarian.

After the son is summoned by the mother (with apparently no input from Remy), the movie starts with one of the best opening long-shots I've seen since The Player as a nun takes Holy Communion from a pristine white chapel into the depths of the hospital, a dilapidated green-hued hell overcrowded with zombie-like patients and disinterested attendants. Here we see the father's plight, sharing a room with three others and, we are told, lucky to not be situated in the hallway where many others have to reside. In a subtle comic move, after offering communion to the others in Remy's hospital room, the nun diplomatically refrains after hearing him rant.

The son (Sebastian) arrives and, in order to provide his father the best care and comfort, maneuvers through the immense and surreal Canadian health bureacracy and the corrupt legal system. He does this via a series of bribes to officials and the Mafia-like Union, diplomatic overtures to the police and even drug scores. Part of the humor is the laser like intensity the son brings to the enterprise and the shock at all the co-opted French-Canadians at his activity. One of the flaws of the movie is that it is hard to understand the son's motivation given his father's attitude towards him. Maybe it's just pure love as it certainly ain't guilt - I don't know.

Sebastian originally proposes to move his father to Baltimore (I assume Johns-Hopkins) for better care but the father rejects that because he will be killed by "Mohammadens" - Remy sees barbarians everywhere - and that since he voted for Medicare he would die by Medicare. Instead, they do go on a series of trips to Vermont for testing. Along the way, in the United States, the camera pans over little American flags set along the road in stark contrast to the lack of any national pride in Quebec.

The film spends much time studying Remy's life and his shortcomings while he rails about the world and his son. Remy is gently asked (by the nun) whether he attended to his father in his dying hour (of course not) and he thereafter begrudgingly accepts Sebastian's charity -- that's not to say he doesn't remain careless and disrespectful, but this starts a more intense and honest soul-searching.

Remy's discussions with the nun and others about religion, communism, colonialism and genocide are telling. At one point Remy rants about the millions killed by European colonialists in North and South America as reason to overlook the supposedly lesser genocides by Communist countries in the 20th century. But then later he rails about how the Pope stood by during World War II and let people die in the concentration camps. Remy seems to be saying that one genocide is excusable while the other is not. He also uses these examples as proof that history is a series of evil episodes therefore proving that God doesn't exist. The nun, who he has put in tears, says that if this is indeed true then she has to believe that there is a God around to forgive us our sins and that indeed man left God and not the other way around.

The movie is apparently set not that long after 9/11 in 2002 and we are reminded of the event via some of the hand-held footage of the planes going into the WTC and references throughout the film. At one point, a hospital security guard is distracted by a discussion on 9/11 where a commentator notes that the attacks may presage an invasion of barbarians.

But in Arcand's world, the barbarians have already invaded, aided and abetted by a self-absorbed intellecual Left, as personified by Remy and his friends. In one of the most telling scenes, Remy's friends (who are brought back together by Sebastian) sit on the porch of a lakefront cabin and wonder whether there was any "ism" they didn't embrace. One of the characters jokes, "cretinism" but Remy, now fully hopped up on heroin to reduce the pain (another sub-plot I won't go into) admits that perhaps "cretinism" was the thing he most embraced. He tells a story about how he hosted a Chinese exchange visitor to his University and prattled on about the wonderful Marxist gains her country has made, realizing later that her patronizing glare hid the fact that she had spent two years in a re-education camp feeding pigs and both her parents had died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. His friends, who are mostly full of vapid chatter, are for once speechless.

The film is surprising in that came from Miramax and won an Oscar. I haven't seen Arcand's other films but a precursor to this film (which resurrected many of the characters) is entitled The Fall of the American Empire. But Arcand denies he is a conservative but that he is nonetheless critiquing the Left. From a discussion on the film with BBC:

"The great virtue of capitalism is that it’s working. If you have an efficient business you’ll go out of business if you don’t provide goods and services at the right price. Does that make me a conservative? I don’t think so. I’m just saying there’s a failure of imagination on the left. We don’t have any working proposition right now. And that is why people of my generation are so intellectually desperate. They have no ideology to cling to and every ideology they believed in has proved itself wrong or unworkable for practical reasons."

The film ends with the final reconciliation of the son with the father, Remy's death and the son leaving Montreal. But before Sebastian leaves, he sets up Remy's heroin source (the daughter of one of Remy's mistresses) in his Mother's old home. She tries to seduce him and he rushes out the house in guilt. In a parallel to an earlier scene, where Remy looks out his hospital window and sees a world passing him by, Sebastian looks out the window of the jet plane as his fiancee rests her head on his shoulder. Will he return again to Montreal and take the beautiful woman living in his old home as his mistress or will he continue on the straight and narrow with his fiancee? The final shot shows the plane ascending in the clouds suggesting that instead, for good or ill, Sebastian is stronger than his father and has become part of the world. We, the viewer, are left on the ground pondering our own role in the world.