THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS

-By Erica Abeel

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The Barbarian Invasions arrives here crowned with accolades. It inspired a standing ovation at Cannes (where little else did), it opened the Toronto Film Festival, and made the elite lineup of the New York Film Festival. How to explain its broad-based appeal? I suspect it's that Denys Arcand has taken on the cheerless subject of mortality, and injected it with ribald humor, satire and joie de vivre--while never shying away from pathos and what he calls 'a poetry of sadness.' The near-equal mix of tears and laughter proves irresistible.

A kind of 17-years-later sequel to The Decline of the American Empire, Invasions zeros in on Rmy (Rmy Girard), memorable from the earlier film as a Montreal-based, hyper-articulate professor and rou, who's now dying of cancer. His ex-wife summons home their son Sbastien (Stphane Rousseau), a successful financier living in London, though he and his father have been estranged for years. Appalled by the squalid conditions of the hospital, Sbastien wields his financial clout to get his dad moved to an unused wing, which he has newly painted and refurbished. He rounds up the old crowd, among them two former mistresses, a gay expat living in Italy, and a paunchy fellow married to a young twit. And with the help of Nathalie (Marie-Jose Croze), daughter of one of Rmy's friends and a heroin addict, Sbastien provides his father with a world-class painkiller.

Arcand pulls gallows humor from subjects not normally considered funny. He does a job on Canadian hospital care (dispelling any illusions Americans might harbor about its superiority); in a running joke, Rmy's doctors never seem to know who he is. Arcand mocks in equal measure union red tape and the way Sbastien untangles it with ever-ready infusions of cash. Even in his reduced state, Rmy remains goatish and feisty, reminiscing about past conquests and cheerfully haranguing a nurse about the failure of religion (while envying her faith). Sbastien's fixation on his laptop and other hi-tech toys is drolly contrasted with his father's computer-illiterate ways and veneration of high culture.

And then there's the sadness. We're not talking Hollywood tearjerking. The sadness wells up unexpectedly from affecting exchanges: Rmy marvels at Nathalie's flirtation with death by overdose, explaining his own attachment to the world with the remark, 'Life grows on you.' And there's pathos in Rmy's self-image as a failure, a man who should have written books but never stepped up to the plate. Sure, you see it coming, yet the father's reconciliation with his son gets you anyway. The final scenes, involving an exquisitely courtly exchange between Nathalie and Rmy, had my entire row at Cannes audibly weeping.

Woven into this account of one man's dying is a batch of multiple meanings attached to 'invasions.' In a quick scene, a hospital employee is seen staring incredulously at an image on TV of a plane ramming the World Trade Center. Clearly, Arcand envisions the Western world as a target for more enemy assaults. Disease and the new plagues form a second invasion (a theme especially apt after Toronto's bout with SARS), as do the drugs that cross borders, and the immigrants seeking economic survival. And there's also the notion that civilization as Rmy and friends have known it is being being overrun by tech-happy yahoos.

Swarming with ideas, the film never turns schematic or hectoring, though--in fact, it took the award in Cannes for Best Screenplay. Rather than an airtight storyline, Invasions grows by accretion, a string of brief scenes separated by fades to black, ordered by poetic design and the director's brilliant intuition. Nor do the characters ever feel rigged--perhaps because, as Arcand has said, "every one of my characters is myself."

--Erica Abeel