• The Barbarian Invasions

8/17/24 (Thurs)

I had thought Denys Arcand’s 2003 work was supposed to be a parody of the bumbling Canadian health care system, but that’s only partly true. It’s also a celebration of a hospitalized randy ex-professor who decides to take his life – and death – into his own hands. This is apparently a sequel to a popular film of 17 years earlier, and I’m sure that knowing those characters would have helped here. But it works perfectly fine as a stand-alone piece. The reviews are sharply divided, with a number of critics decrying it as a glib and cynical attempt to cash in on the older film, especially the soppy ending between the father and son. While I see their point, I’d prefer to enjoy it on its own terms.

An old college professor is dying in a Montreal hospital, where the care can be haphazard: doctors constantly have to weave their way through corridors crammed with people and machinery, and never even get the patient’s name right. His estranged son, a successful financier, is persuaded by the mother to come say goodbye. The left-wing father dislikes the materialistic son, who he complains has never read a book. But the much-cuckolded mother points out that the son makes more money. The father refuses to go to America for better treatment, passionately (or stubbornly) defending the socialist medical system that his generation fought so hard to introduce.

The son, frustrated by the inefficiencies in Canada’s state-run system, thus makes things work in the way he knows best – bribery. He pays off the union to secure a private room for his father on an unused floor, pays the father’s old students to come visit, gets old friends (presumably from the first film) to drop by (like a pre-funeral Big Chill), and most startlingly gets the police to reveal how to secure heroin in order to ease the father’s pain. The junkie he uses to procure the drug proves an interesting character on her own. After much reminiscing with family and friends, he gets the woman to inject enough heroin to end it all for a peaceful death, surrounded by those he loves.

The title refers to the 9-11 terrorists, still a big topic at the time, but it can also be the capitalist son barging into socialist Quebec (and making it work) or the cancer invading the father’s body. The father may rage against the crass ways of his money-making son, but it is the efforts of the latter that make the father’s final days tolerable – not that the father will ever acknowledge or realize it. The son’s activity can be read more broadly as American ways creeping in and threatening to overtake the Canadian ideal. While the film gets a bit mawkish at the end, its points are well taken. Despite the director’s own leftish slant, he’s made an enjoyable romp that slyly addresses serious themes.