Denys Arcand's Le Declin de l'empire americain and Les Invasions barbares 9781442687851

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
LE DÉCLIN DE L’EMPIRE AMÉRICAIN
1. The Production and Reception of Scabrous Conversations
2. The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine
3. The Death of Quebec History
4. Friends in the Landscape, or Was Louise Right All Along?
LES INVASIONS BARBARES
5. From an Obsession with Death to an Oscar
6. ‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts
7. Sex, Death, and the Cinema
Conclusion: Sex, Death and Boredom
Filmography
Notes
Selected Bibliography

Citation preview

DENYS ARCAND’S LE DÉCLIN DE L’EMPIRE AMÉRICAIN and LES INVASIONS BARBARES

The release of Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire) in 1986 marked a major turning point in Quebec cinema. It was the first Québécois film that enjoyed huge critical and commercial success at home and abroad. Arcand’s tragicomedy about eight intellectuals gathered around a dinner table relating sexy anecdotes became the top-grossing film of all time in Quebec and was the first Canadian feature to be nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category. Seventeen years later, Arcand won an Academy Award for the sequel, Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), where the amusing insouciance of the thirty-somethings talking dirty in Le Déclin is replaced by a sense of moral responsibility and serene resignation. In this study, André Loiselle presents the first in-depth analysis of both films within the context of Quebec culture. Through close readings and concise cultural analysis of two of the most important films in the history of Quebec cinema, Loiselle demonstrates the ways in which Arcand’s work represents a snapshot of the evolution of the FrenchCanadian film industry since 1980. The companion films trace the decline of Quebec’s national dream and the Québécois’s attempts to cling to their identity against the forces of barbaric globalization. The second title in the new Canadian Cinema series, Denys Arcand’s ‘Le Déclin de l’empire américain’ and ‘Les Invasions barbares’ is essential reading for cinephiles, film critics, and anyone with an interest in cultural studies and Canadian and Quebec history. (Canadian Cinema) andré loiselle is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University where he also teaches film studies.

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CANADIAN CINEMA 2

DENYS ARCAND’S LE DÉCLIN DE L’EMPIRE AMÉRICAIN and LES INVASIONS BARBARES ANDRÉ LOISELLE

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn: 978-0-8020-9933-4 (cloth) isbn: 978-0-8020-9623-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Loiselle, André, 1963– Denys Arcand’s Le déclin de l’empire américain and Les invasions barbares / André Loiselle. (Canadian cinema ; 2) Includes bibliographical references. isbn: 978-0-8020-9933-4 (bound) isbn: 978-0-8020-9623-4 (pbk.) 1. Arcand, Denys, 1941– – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Déclin de l’empire américain (Motion picture). 3. Invasions barbares (Motion picture). I. Title. II. Series: Canadian cinema (Toronto, Ont.) 2 pn1998.3.a72l64 2008

791.4302c33092

c2008-904902-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Introduction

LE DÉCLIN DE L’EMPIRE AMÉRICAIN 1 The Production and Reception of Scabrous Conversations 2 The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine 3 The Death of Quebec History 4 Friends in the Landscape, or Was Louise Right All Along?

LES INVASIONS BARBARES

3 15

19 31 59 73 85

5 From an Obsession with Death to an Oscar 6 ‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts 7 Sex, Death, and the Cinema

91 111 145

Conclusion: Sex, Death, and Boredom

155

Filmography Notes Bibliography

161 173 187

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Introduction

The release of Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin de l’empire américain in 1986 marked a turning point in Quebec cinema. It was the first Frenchlanguage film made in Canada to enjoy huge critical and commercial success at home and to become a genuine hit abroad. There had been critically acclaimed films from Quebec, such as Mon oncle Antoine (1971, Claude Jutra) and Les Ordres (1974, Michel Brault), and some movies such as Deux femmes en or (1970, Claude Fournier) and Les Plouffe (1981, Gilles Carle) had been quite lucrative at the box office. But none before Le Déclin had managed to garner awards from around the world,1 win almost unanimous international praise from critics, and play for months in theatres from Montreal to Paris. Arcand’s tragicomedy about eight intellectuals relating sexy anecdotes while sipping expensive wine became the top-grossing film of all time in Quebec and was the first Canadian feature to be nominated for an Academy Award in the foreign-language category. It lost the Oscar to the Dutch war movie, The Assault (1986, Fons Rademakers). But seventeen years later, Arcand returned to the Academy Awards with the sequel of Le Déclin, Les Invasions barbares and this time walked away with the coveted prize. Revisiting the main characters from the 1986 film, whose financial success it actually surpassed,2 Les Invasions barbares (2003) does not merely rehash the old formula. Rather it shows the original’s characters

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under significantly different circumstances. One person is dying, another is henpecked by an overbearing spouse, yet another has given up on relationships altogether. Whereas sex and gender relations were central to the former work, the latter deals with aging and filial love. While comedic cynicism dominates Le Déclin, wistful melodrama governs the spectator’s response to Les Invasions. The amusingly selfish insouciance of the thirty-somethings gathered around a dinner table in Arcand’s first hit is replaced in the sequel by a sense of moral responsibility and serene resignation. As such, the two films respond to one another, one showing a darkly sentimental yet mature alternative to the other’s fun-loving indifference. It is thus appropriate to consider both films together in this study; for, while Les Invasions could not have existed without Le Déclin, now that the sequel does exist, it has become virtually impossible to fully understand the 1986 characters without some awareness of their older selves. Furthermore, Le Déclin and Les Invasions can be productively interpreted within the broader context of Quebec cinema as twin texts that crystallize perhaps better than any other works the evolution of the French-Canadian film industry since 1980. Given the significance of these films, it is not surprising that in 2007 Denys Arcand was voted the most important director in the history of cinema in Quebec.3 But in spite of the fame and success he has now achieved, he was not always a favourite among critics and audiences in his native province. In fact, by the time he had reached forty years of age, Arcand had come to a dead end in his career, which left him with little hope for a viable future in filmmaking. Sitting in his dingy one-bedroom apartment in the early 1980s, Arcand would often look out the window at the Salvation Army Shelter across the street, wondering whether he might some day end up as one of the Sally Ann’s regulars.4 The exceptional popular and critical success of Le Déclin might have been just around the corner,

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but in the early 1980s Arcand’s career was going nowhere. Here was a man who had already been an active filmmaker for over twenty years and had to his credit a number of critically acclaimed documentaries and fiction films. Yet, he could not find meaningful work in the Quebec film industry. While still a history student at the Université de Montréal in 1961, he had contributed to the production of one of the first modern fiction feature films made in Canada, Seul ou avec d’autres (1961), spearheaded by his fellow student Denis Héroux, who would go on to become an important producer. More than twenty years after Seul ou avec d’autres, Héroux threw a bone at a chronically underemployed Arcand, hiring him in 1983–4 to direct a mediocre adaptation of the dreadful Roger Lemelin novel, Le Crime d’Ovide Plouffe.5 Arcand’s uninspired version of Lemelin’s yarn marked perhaps the lowest low in a career that had witnessed its fair share of downs. During the 1960s Arcand had worked at the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada on short documentaries that attracted little attention and delivered even less financial security. In 1970, however, he emerged as one of the most notorious documentarians in Quebec, thanks to his three-hour Marxist essay, On est au cotton (1970), on the textile industry. The film was banned by the NFB for its putative attacks against Edward F. King, the CEO of Dominion Textile. King had powerful friends, who put pressure on NFB commissioner, Sydney Newman, to pull the plug on Arcand’s already completed documentary.6 But as censorship is wont to do, the NFB’s ban drew much more attention to the documentary than it otherwise might have received. Newly available video technology allowed the clandestine circulation of the film, which became something of a cult movie among the intelligentsia.7 In Quebec, 1970 was an especially politically charged year. In October the terrorist group Front de libération du Québec, which opposed anglophone federalism, kidnapped a British diplomat and a provincial politician and assassi-

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nated the latter. In such a context, On est au coton was seen as an emblem of resistance against Anglo-capitalist oppression, and Arcand acquired a reputation as a hard-hitting, incisive cineaste. Riding the small wave of notoriety triggered by On est au cotton Arcand moved on to the private sector in the early 1970s and directed three abrasive fiction features in five years: La maudite galette (1971), Réjeanne Padavoni (1973), and Gina (1975). The first is a stylistically awkward but nevertheless engaging experiment in genre cinema; a raw and biting crime thriller about a group of small-time thugs who torture and kill an elderly man for his money and then turn on each another to get all the cash. ‘In this fictional film, like the two that would follow,’ notes Pierre Véronneau, ‘Arcand examines the dregs of Quebec society. It seems that this world fascinates him, as if he sees a deeper metaphor for Quebec itself; a decrepit and decadent country in which he places no hope.’8 Arcand’s reading of Quebec as a decadent and hopeless society that is bound to vanish still informs his later films, including Le Déclin de l’empire américain and Les Invasions barbares. In 1971 the working class and the lumpenproletariat offered a better allegory for Arcand to illustrate the decay of his nation than the hedonistic intellectual elite that would later people his work. By 1973 it was the corrupt bourgeoisie that presented the most fitting object for the cineaste’s caustic criticism in Réjeanne Padovani. Inspired by what he witnessed during the filming of his documentary on Quebec politics, Québec: Duplessis et après ... (1972), when he realized that there was a close connection between the political class and organized crime,9 Arcand conceived the story of Vincent Padovani (Jean Lajeunesse), a mafia boss, owner of a large construction company, who holds a supper for dignitaries to celebrate the inauguration of a highway by his company. The crux of the drama resides in the return, in the middle of the celebration, of Vincent’s estranged wife, Réjeanne (Luce Guilbeault). Unmoved by her request to see her children, Padovani

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implicitly orders his men to execute her and dump her body in the bowels of the highway. As the Mayor of Montreal (René Caron), the minister of public works (J. Léo Gagnon), and other convives eat a delicious meal, chat about their foreign travels, and enjoy a private performance from a former opera singer (Margot McKinnon), the guests’ bodyguards and Padovani’s thugs guzzle beer in the basement, play shuffleboard, gripe about their jobs, and do their bosses’ bidding. While the contrasts between the rulers and the staff – with subdivisions along gender lines in each group – are obvious, Arcand also blurs the distinctions between the overlords and the underlings, creating a rich tapestry of character relationships that attests to the widespread corruption that afflicts Quebec culture as a whole. Sometimes compared to Jean Renoir’s upstairs-downstairs masterpiece, La Règle du jeu (1939),10 for its complex picture of societal decay, Réjeanne Padovani was Arcand’s most critically acclaimed film to date, receiving praise even at the Cannes Film Festival.11 Its critical success abroad was such, in fact, that a few French producers tried to convince Arcand to direct his next project in France. In a moment of nationalistic delusion, he rejected these offers and chose to stay in Quebec. In hindsight, he often regretted at this decision,12 since his next fiction film, the semi-autobiographical Gina, would prove to be his worst critical failure and mark the beginning of a very dark period in his life. The self-referential quality of Gina is impossible to miss. The narrative revolves around a small crew of filmmakers from the National Cinema Board, who are shooting a documentary on the textile industry. Several scenes that reproduce moments from On est au coton and Arcand’s own brother Gabriel playing the role of the documentary’s director, show Gina to be clearly a reflexive commentary on the difficult process of making a political film. Alongside the narrative of the filmmakers, who have to go behind management’s back and get in trouble with the authorities in order to get footage that exposes the true situa-

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I.1. Luce Guilbeault as a terrified Réjeanne before her assassination. Réjeanne Padovani. Courtesy of Cinak.

Introduction

tion of textile workers, Gina also follows the story of the eponymous exotic dancer (Céline Lomez) performing at the small-town hotel where the crew is staying. The film establishes similarities and contrasts among the textile workers, the sex worker, and the ‘cultural workers’ from the National Cinema Board, presenting them as people who suffer various degrees of oppression. The narrative movement among the three groups, who both resemble and differ from one another, has been labelled ‘polymeric’13 and ‘dialogic’14 in order to suggest Arcand’s refusal to establish simplistic relations between characters from various backgrounds. For instance, Gina and Dolores (Frédérique Collin), one of the textile workers whom the documentarians have been interviewing, generally come across as sharing a common position of subjugation. However, a casual chat between the two in a woman’s washroom reveals that the exotic dancer makes much more money than the proletarian, thus calling into question the validity of drawing a straight analogy between different types of ‘workers.’ The flip side of Gina’s superior earning power, of course, is the much greater ‘occupational hazard’ involved in her line of work. As in Réjeanne Padovani, violence against women is a central theme in Gina, but here violence is much more graphic than in the previous film. Early in the narrative, Gina sees one of her fellow strippers beaten up by their ‘agent’ (Donald Lautrec) because she failed to show up at the hotel where she was supposed to appear. Later, after one of her shows, Gina herself is raped by a gang of snowmobilers, who had been harassing her during her performance. Replete with dark irony, the rape scene is among the most disturbing moments of 1970s Quebec cinema. Perhaps most obviously, the attack perpetrated by rapists dressed in snowmobile suits, who look like extraterrestrials, unfolds as the Canadian national anthem, followed by ‘God Save the Queen,’ plays on a television set in the background, marking the end of the day’s broadcast. This scene clearly

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I.2. Gina’s rape. Courtesy of Roland Smith. © Les Productions Pierre Lamy.

Introduction

invites a reading that assigns to Arcand some ‘separatist’ intentions as he links musical symbols of federalism to violation. More disturbing and difficult to interpret is the presence of women in the snowmobile gang, who not merely witness the rape but actually assist in the commission of the crime. In one instance, a female character fellates a male accomplice so he can muster an erection to penetrate Gina. When I asked Arcand about the relation between gender and violence, he answered: It is true that women in my films are often victims of violence. But I was not trying to condone or condemn specifically violence against women. I was just portraying the atrocities of our society. At the end of Gina, it is the female character who comes out the winner. The men who raped her have all been killed upon her order and she leaves for Mexico. Like everyone else, Gina resorts to violence because she lives in a horrific milieu immersed in a blood bath. Actually, Gina is the one who provokes the goriest death in any of my films, when she shoves a man in a snowblower.15

The scene described by Arcand, in which Gina’s agent and his men massacre her assailants and she herself disposes in the bloodiest possible way of the leader of the snowmobile gang (Claude Blanchard), shocked critics. Most reviewers lambasted the film. People who had loved Réjeanne Padovani hated Gina. It was not invited to any film festivals. For many, Arcand had all of a sudden become a ‘sell-out’ who had veered towards exploitation cinema. Yet at the same time, he could not find a job in the commercial film industry. Beyond that, he also felt he had lost all inspiration. He still wanted to express himself through film, but he had run out of things to say.16 This situation depressed him immensely.17 In 1977 he enjoyed some minor success as a scriptwriter for the television mini-series Duplessis, which followed the political

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career of the charismatic and authoritarian man who dominated Quebec politics for over twenty years in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Premier Maurice Duplessis. But as a director he worked on only one significant film between Gina in 1975 and Le Déclin de l’empire américain in 1985: Le Confort et l’indifférence (1981), his documentary on the first Parti Québécois government and the first referendum on sovereignty-association. Immediately after the victory of the Parti Québécois in 1976, NFB producer Roger Frappier determined that a documentary had to be made on this crucial historical moment. The people had elected a government whose main platform was to achieve independence for Quebec, and, for Frappier, the only filmmaker able to capture the complexity of the event was Denys Arcand. He drove more than 200 kilometres from Montreal to Deschambault, the small village where Arcand grew up and where he had now returned, armed with a few bottles of good wine, set on convincing the filmmaker to get involved in the project. Arcand initially refused categorically. He absolutely dreaded the idea of tracking down politicians as he had done for Québec: Duplessis et après: ‘spend[ing] my evenings in church-basement meetings, shooting political speeches, following politicians in a station-wagon to record their insipid statements ... No thanks.’18 But Frappier insisted, and with enough wine in him, Arcand eventually capitulated. He agreed to a salary of approximately $4,000 per year for the four-year project.19 Arcand and his crew shot miles of footage covering the PQ’s lengthy preparation for the 1980 Referendum and the campaign itself. The filmmaker had no idea of how to structure all this material until his brother Gabriel suggested using Machiavelli’s theories as an organizing principle. Then everything fell into place: ‘In the light of Machiavelli’s teachings, the defeat of the “OUI” makes perfect sense’ he once told me.20 Throughout the film, Arcand includes vignettes featuring actor JeanPierre Ronfard in the role of a bourgeois Machiavelli explaining why a majority of Quebeckers would never vote in favour of sovereignty. ‘This

12

Introduction

is to be asserted in general of men,’ explains Arcand’s Machiavelli, ‘that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed, they are yours entirely.’21 Comfortable with their current condition, afraid of change, ‘spoiled by the crumbs of American wealth,’22 as Arcand has said, French Canadians would never take the risk of losing whatever little they have in order to achieve some distant promise of freedom. In fact, the filmmaker has argued that this desire for comfort is not exclusively Québécois, but actually a pan-Canadian attribute: ‘What Canadians seek above anything else is comfort.’23 Many critics, of both nationalist and federalist persuasions, attacked Arcand for his putative contempt towards the people of Quebec. According to Montreal Gazette reviewer, Nick Auf der Maur, Le Confort et l’indifférence was a ‘cheap, condescending, ivory tower view of Quebecers.’24 The film did appeal to the members of the Quebec Film Critics Association, who gave the documentary the award for best feature of the year in 1982.25 But beyond this small group of cinephiles, it met with almost unanimous disparagement. While this was yet another blow to Arcand’s faltering career, the experience of Le Confort et l’indifférence would prove instrumental in the realization of Le Déclin de l’empire américain.

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T

he production of Le Confort et l’indifférence had a crucial impact on Arcand’s career in at least two ways. First, the professional relationship Arcand developed with Frappier during the production of Le Confort et l’indifférence weighed in the balance when the latter, now head of the National Film Board’s Studio C, was given the authority to hire the filmmakers of his choice for a new initiative aimed at producing small-budget fiction films. Arcand was among the first cineastes to be recruited by Frappier.1 Second, Le Confort et l’indifférence allowed Arcand to perceive a fundamental change in Quebec culture. After the failure of the sovereignty-association option on 20 May 1980, when 60 per cent of Quebeckers voted ‘NON’ to the P.Q.’s plan,2 ‘comfort and indifference’ became the order of day; the French-Canadian ethos had shifted from a devotion to the pursuit of a collective dream to a focus on individual pleasures. The new Quebec hedonism that concludes Le Confort et l’indifférence provided the ideological backdrop for Arcand’s new project for Frappier. Initially, Arcand did not consciously set out to produce a film about post-referendum self-indulgence. In fact, he has claimed that he never intended to make a ‘postréférendaire’ film.3 Rather, the deciding factor was the diminutive budget he had at his disposal. Limited to $800,000, he knew that he could not possibly propose an action-packed genre film to Frappier. So he started thinking about what sort of movies could be made on a shoestring and still manage to be engaging. The cineaste eventually decided to write a conversation piece like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981). But what topic of conversation could remain interesting for ninety minutes? Sex, obviously! Starting with the premise of ‘people sitting at a table talking about sex,’ Arcand spent the summer of 1984 writing a 250-page script tentatively entitled ‘Conversations scabreuses.’ A bit concerned about the prospect of producing a film exclusively about sex, Frappier went to see NFB commissioner, François Macerola and warned him about Arcand’s contribution. Marcerola approved the project.4

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1

The Production and Reception of Scabrous Conversations Based on Arcand’s own experiences, as well as scraps of information taken from anyone willing to discuss their sex life with him, the first draft of ‘Conversations scabreuses’ revolves around a convivial supper at a country house among eight friends: four women and four men. The conversations are an affable compendium of sexual anecdotes and lies; underneath lascivious pleasantries lurk contempt and hatred.1 While the script had none of the physical violence found in La maudite galette, Réjeanne Padovani, and – even more so – Gina, ‘Conversations scabreuses’ still displayed the biting cynicism present in the earlier features, albeit only in verbal form. It soon became clear, however, that if the script were to be comprised mainly of conversations and little or no physical action, characters had to be able to express themselves correctly. Since the late 1960s Quebec cinema, like Quebec drama and literature for that matter, had featured characters speaking joual (FrenchCanadian slang) in a conscious attempt on the part of artists to assert the existence of a distinct Quebec identity. While this approach was instrumental in creating a vibrant popular culture in the province in the 1970s,2 Arcand recognized that it also meant that in such films characters ‘speak with grunts rather than words.’ Characters for ‘Conversations scabreuses’ thus had to be educated so they could be understood when they speak. ‘I could have chosen physicians or engineers, but it

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was easier for me to deal with history professors because it is a milieu I know very well.’3 Furthermore, characters who spoke standard French would help to make the film marketable in France.4 But presenting a group of history professors talking exclusively about sex also had its own set of implications. As part of the cultural elite, why would these people have nothing better to do than chat about their sexcapades? Arcand understood that professors, like most other upper-middle-class Quebeckers, do not work very hard. Those characters are rich and comfortable because they benefit from the wealth of America – they live ‘off the crumbs of the American table.’ Quebeckers, like the rest of Canadians, are to Americans what the Etruscans were to the Romans: a marginal, parasitic nation that could profit from the wealth of the neighbouring empire; spectators who had enjoyed watching the rise of the empire, and who were now witnessing its decline.5 From November 1984 to February 1985 the somewhat disjointed script of ‘Conversations scabreuses’ was transformed into the more structured screenplay for Le Déclin de l’empire américain.6 A day in the life of eight characters, the screenplay follows almost to the letter the classical unities of drama, with a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue. The narrative, which covers about twenty-four hours, is set in only two main locations, with a few flashbacks, and it culminates in a ‘revelation’ that precipitates a drastic change in character dynamics. The first act presents a group of four women working out at the gym and four men cooking for them in a comfortable country house. After an afternoon of witty conversations divided along gender lines, the two groups meet for supper at the country house. The pleasant conversations around the dinner table and during a leisurely walk in the natural setting of the house comprise the second act. The third act unfolds as day turns into night and twilight brings the group to a point of no return. The morning following this long day’s journey into night is marked by ambiva-

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lence. The epilogue seems to suggest that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Arcand introduces his ‘thesis’ early in the film by including a brief interview with one of the historians, Professor Dominique Saint-Arnaud (Dominique Michel), who explains that self-indulgence is normal for a society in decline. Arcand wrote Dominique’s line – ‘I pose the question: is the frantic drive for personal happiness we see in society today linked to the decline of the American empire as we are now experiencing it?’7 – before he had settled on a title. It is only in hindsight that he noticed how the line encapsulated the issues at stake in the film.8 So it is in a roundabout way, from vacuous sexual chatter through the decadence of ancient Rome to the decline of the American Empire, that Arcand sketched his picture of epicurean post-referendum Quebec. Celebrated playwright Michel Tremblay, who read a draft of the screenplay for the NFB, found the idea of depicting the decline of the empire through the lens of sex to be mesmerizingly effective.9 As the screenplay evolved, Frappier recognized that the project had greater potential than he had originally thought. Convinced that a bigger budget would allow Arcand to develop his project to its full potential, Frappier appealed to the private-sector to raise funds. Wellestablished producer René Malo, of Corporation Images M & M, read the script and agreed to co-produce the film. Although he never liked the title, which he thought was too long and gave the wrong impression that this was a documentary on the United States,10 Malo loved the screenplay and was convinced from the start that the film would enjoy some success. His confidence never wavered, even when many others had their doubts.11 Not everyone who read Arcand’s early drafts liked what they saw. Readers for Telefilm Canada and its provincial equivalent at the time, Société générale du cinéma, were not impressed. ‘Monolithic characters,’ text ‘full of clichés,’ ‘boring jokes,’ ‘misogyny,’ and ‘cynical dialogues’ were among the criticisms found in the readers’

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reports.12 Despite these negative responses, Frappier and Malo still managed to secure funding from both agencies, as well as from RadioCanada. Altogether, they raised $1.8 million, which allowed Arcand to elaborate a screenplay beyond the confines of the gym and the dinner table, including flashbacks in a variety of locations.13 Casting took place in July 1985. Arcand already had a few actors in mind. In 1979 he had written a short skit, ‘Un peu plus qu’un peu moins’ [A little bit more than a little bit less] for the stage show Les sept péchés capitaux [The seven capital sins]. When he saw the play, he was amazed by the performances of the two main male actors. He determined then and there that, if he ever were hired to make another fiction film, he would find a way to cast them both in it. The actors were Yves Jacques and Rémy Girard,14 who would incarnate, respectively Claude, the gay aesthete, and Rémy, the über-womanizer, in Le Déclin. Arcand gave them small parts in Le Crime d’Ovide Plouffe in 1983, but only with Le Déclin could he finally give them the meaty roles he thought they deserved. Arcand had to work hard to persuade producers to hire two unknowns in leading roles. Girard recalls that he had to audition for the part even if Arcand had already named the character ‘Rémy.’15 Girard and Jacques would also reappear in Jésus de Montréal (1989) and Les Invasions barbares. Arcand held open-call auditions for some of the other roles. Interestingly, it was during the audition process for Déclin that he got the idea for his next film. A young man auditioning for the part of Alain – the naive graduate student who learns the ‘rules of the sex game’ from his professors – was currently playing the role of Jesus in a passion play produced at the Oratoir St-Joseph on Mount Royal. The young actor did not get the part of Alain, but Arcand thought the passion play was a fascinating idea and wrote a synopsis for Frappier.16 Three years later Arcand released his own version of the play and enjoyed another international success with Jésus de Montréal.

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The shooting of Le Déclin, which by all accounts went very well, began in late August 1985 in Montreal. The production then moved to the countryside, Lac Memphrémagog, where principal photography continued throughout September and wrapped up in early October. The ensemble cast developed very close bonds, even choosing to spend their days off together.17 This genuine camaraderie clearly comes across on screen. But as Monique Fortier began editing the footage and showed various rough cuts to colleagues, responses were lukewarm. While people liked the film’s clever social commentary, they thought it was a fundamentally dark story with a sad ending. Arcand did not know what to expect. The prospect that he might have yet another failure was looming heavily on the horizon. To improve the rhythm of the film, Arcand reluctantly decided to cut twenty minutes from what he had initially thought could be the final cut. As Fortier relates, ‘Denys forced himself to recognize that some passages were complacently lengthy and affected pacing.’18 Yet even after these cuts, the selection committee of the Cannes Film Festival recommended more. When Arcand and Frappier refused, the film was dropped from the official competition. As a consolation price, it was chosen to open the ‘Director’s Fortnight.’ To promote the film, Malo distributed fliers with pictures of a welldressed woman and man, with breasts graffitied on the former and an erect penis on the latter.19 In spite of the shock effect of this image, there was little buzz around the film’s impending premiere on 12 May 1986. Canadian newspapers had little to say. La Presse had run a brief story in April,20 and a generic report on Cannes published in the Ottawa Citizen on 10 May mentioned Arcand’s film in passing, along with Leon Marr’s Dancing in the Dark (1986), as lower-profile entries than the preceding year’s Joshua Then and Now (1985, Ted Kotcheff ).21 Then, on the day of the premier something unexpected happened. ‘There was a mini riot because everybody wanted tickets for my film,’ Arcand told me. ‘I don’t know why ... there was something magical in the air.’22

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1.1. Promotional poster for Le Déclin de l’empire américain. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Yvan Adam and Denis Lafaille.

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A twenty-minute standing ovation overwhelmed Arcand, who had never experienced such a response. All of a sudden, the forty-four year old filmmaker realized he no longer had to worry about ending up at the Salvation Army shelter. Regardless of what would happen next, the reception at Cannes would ensure that he would be in demand back home. Malo laughed all the way to the bank as distributors from twenty countries poured $600,000 into his coffers on the morning after the premiere.23 Déclin’s success was officialized with the prestigious Critic’s Prize. Globe and Mail reviewer Jay Scott always liked to brag that ‘Toronto critics first discovered and supported Decline at the Cannes film festival [while] the Quebec critical reaction was more tepid.’24 Yet the Canadian premiere of the film was not in self-righteous Toronto but in fickle Montreal, on 20 June 1986, a few days before Arcand’s forty-fifth birthday on 25 June. It was a massive hit. The perfect mixture of comedic sexual content and social commentary allowed Déclin to appeal to both the intellectual elite and mainstream audiences. Rave reviews and sold-out theatres made Arcand’s small film a veritable cultural phenomenon. By the time it closed its first run after playing in theatres for almost a year, it had surpassed Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) as the biggest box office success in French-speaking Quebec. In English Canada, it received standing ovations at the Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival) and opened throughout the country in September/October to great critical and popular success, even if the promotional campaign was somewhat tamer, without the penis and breast graffiti on the poster. It made $1 million in the anglophone provinces, a record for a Quebec film. Incidentally, this record was surpassed in 1989 by Arcand’s other hit of the decade, Jésus de Montréal.25 Garth Drabinsky acquired the rights for distribution in the United States, where it was generally well received by critics, including some heavy hitters such as Vincent Canby and Andrew Sarris. According to

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Denis Bachand, who has analyzed in detail the reception of the film in the United States, its success rested in great part on its appeal for 1980s baby boomers, who recognized themselves in these endearingly cynical thirty-something academics.26 The Oscar nomination for best foreign language film confirmed the succès d’estime of Arcand’s sixth fiction feature. Arcand received another nomination in 1990 for Jésus de Montréal and finally won the award with Les Invasions barbares in 2004. Le Déclin’s most lucrative run, however, was in France, where it earned $10 million, making it one of the top five movies at the Parisian box office in 1987. It became something of a cult film there, playing in one Paris theatre for six years, until 1993.27 But not everyone enjoyed the film. The British, for instance, could not care less for these lustful French Canadian pseudo-intellectuals,28 and even where the film generally enjoyed success, there were many dissenting voices. Some of the most vicious attacks came from home. Indeed, Quebec intellectuals, such as novelist Louky Bersianik, essayist Jean Larose, and sociologist Louise Vandelac, pounced on Arcand for his constant use of clichés and his run-of-the-mill sexism and misogyny. For some, Déclin was merely a crude sex comedy, a ‘film de fesses’ like Deux femmes en or, which up to 1986 had been the top-grossing Quebec film. For others, it was simply a glorification of petit bourgeois bad taste.29 On the English-Canadian side, York University film professor Robin Wood, who had never been particularly interested in Canadian or Québécois cinema, described Le Déclin as ‘relentless smartass audience titillation.’ Wood resented Arcand primarily for putting forth his lustful scholars as representative of an ineffectual intelligentsia that has lost its social relevance: The film shows its group of academics to be thoroughly insulated, isolated, self-absorbed, imaginatively constricted, obsessed with sex not as a crucial mode of human communication but as a means of bolstering

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the ego; but it also offers them as adequate spokespersons for its world view. One has finally to assume Arcand’s complicity with his characters ... [The film’s] complacent despair (a certain brand of despair can be downright smug) involves its necessary corollary: the casual dismissal, in a couple of sentences, of both Marx and Freud, hence of any possibility of an alternative analysis, diagnosis and remedy ... Having disposed so glibly (and fashionably) of any constructive alternatives, the film can smugly relish its own pessimism undisturbed, and pass on to intellectuals in the audience the comforting reflection that there is really no point in fighting for anything any more.30

While Wood is justified in his criticism of the characters, I am not convinced that one must ‘assume Arcand’s complicity with his characters.’ Speaking with the cineaste about criticisms such as Wood’s, which condemn his lack of a clear stance against his characters, I asked whether he was glorifying the behaviours he exposes in the film. He responded, I am obviously not glorifying the characters. However, the first rule of dramatic writing is that you cannot scorn your characters. When you scorn your characters, there is no drama, only caricature. So I am always ambivalent towards my characters. I find some of their witticisms amusing, and others contemptible. Sometimes they can express great insight into their own condition, and the next minute they prove incapable of seeing the blatantly obvious. That is the way human beings are. Writing a screenplay is not like writing an essay ... When you write drama you are among the mortals, you must accept their flaws as well as their qualities, you must put beauty and ugliness in the same basket. That is the only way to have living characters.31

As we will see presently, some characters sometimes speak for Arcand. None, however, can be adequately interpreted as a mouthpiece for the

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filmmaker from beginning to end. Arcand has said that he is speaking ‘throughout the film,’32 but his ‘speaking’ is not to be seen only in the words uttered by the characters. It is the whole film, in its sounds, images, music, mise en scène, and editing, that speaks for the cineaste. There are several instances where characters explicitly contradict one another. In one scene in particular, the four women – the head of the History Department, Dominique, the naive housewife Louise (Dorothée Berryman), the sado-masochistic contract lecturer Diane (Louise Portal), and the history student who also moonlights as an erotic masseuse Danielle (Geneviève Rioux) – are working out at the gym talking about their respective sexual experiences. Louise, the most conservative, relates the one occasion on which she experimented with extramarital sex at a swingers’ party that she and her husband, Rémy, attended. Louise tells the other women that she took part in the orgy as a way to show her love for her spouse. Yet the shot immediately following shows Rémy denying that he ever indulged in wife swapping. One of them is obviously lying. Here, it is likely that Rémy is lying to avoid looking foolish before his friend Pierre (Pierre Curzi). Earlier, Pierre had disparaged middle-aged couples who, rather than getting a divorce, ‘renovate their houses, who cross-country ski to Povoknituk, or scour the sex shops for chains and whatever. They swap wives in suburbia. Anything to escape years of boredom.’ After hearing this comment, Rémy would be unlikely to admit that he and his wife have indulged in such contemptibly banal activities. Furthermore, Rémy was earlier praised for his ability to ‘lie through his teeth,’ and the fact that Louise’s recollection is accompanied by a flashback gives her version more credence. However, it is not impossible that Louise would also exaggerate her anecdote to try to fit in better with her more promiscuous friends,33 and flashbacks have been known to ‘lie’: think of Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa) among many other examples. The point is not whether one is lying while the

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other is telling the truth. Rather, what matters is the juxtaposition itself, where the two groups are compared and contrasted in a dialogic34 manner to encourage reflection on the part of the spectator. In one scene Rémy states, ‘comparison turns me on.’ This might very well be the only moment when this character serves as a mouthpiece for the cineaste. Arcand is always turned on, artistically and ideologically if not sexually (although he might very well be) by comparison. From the upstairs-downstairs structure of Réjeanne Padovani to the father-son dichotomy of Les Invasions barbares, in which an ailing Rémy tries to reconcile with his estranged son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), Arcand uses comparisons and contrasts to provoke complex reactions in the spectator. While Rémy speaks for Arcand in the aforementioned scene, it is Dominique who most often serves as his mouthpiece. When she says, late in the film, ‘one thing I can’t stomach ... blindness. People who are unable to see reality,’ it is Arcand’s opinion that she expresses.35 Like Dominique, the filmmaker has no patience for those who refuse to face the truth. He explains his dark perspective on Quebec culture not as a sign of cynicism but rather as a result of his uncompromising realism. Furthermore, it is Dominique who expresses Arcand’s general theory about the decline of the empire at the beginning of the narrative.36 And, of course, she also gives the film its title, which evokes both Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–22). It is certainly not irrelevant that it is a female character who comes across as the most lucid mouthpiece in the film, for Le Déclin is in great part a commentary on the transformation of the female role in contemporary culture. Wood might have felt personally insulted because the film depicts his class, the intelligentsia, in a state of stagnation and dismay. But the filmmaker is not so much talking about the decline of a specific class as about the collapse of a gender.

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Those who are really stuck in a rut in Le Déclin de l’empire américain are not the intelligentsia in general, but the men belonging to that class who are faced with drastic changes in their relationships with women. As Angéline Martel has argued, what this film is really about is ‘the decline of patriarchy.’37 This decline is expressed symptomatically through an anxious attempt, on the part of heterosexual men, to regain their sense of masculine self by trying to reconstruct, albeit only discursively, an idea of femininity that is believed to have vanished. Masculinity, within patriarchy, defines itself as what the feminine is not.38 In an age where women have redefined their roles, patriarchy finds itself in peril of losing its central pillar: the patriarchal woman.

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The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine ‘One of the fundamental notions of the film’s mise en scène,’ says Arcand, ‘is that it’s the men who are in the kitchen cooking while the women are out bodybuilding.’1 The juxtaposition of the men in the domestic space, preparing a meal for their female friends, who are at the gym, seems to represent a progressive role reversal. Furthermore, the topic of conversation in both spaces also appears to foster equality among the genders, since the women are as open and outspoken about their sexual adventures as the men. Whether it is Dominique’s amusing encounter with a muscular Sicilian cop endowed with a pathetically small penis or Rémy’s anecdote about two American hitchhikers he picked up and had sex with, both groups are equally at ease discussing sexuality. But some have argued that, in fact, Arcand remains very traditional in his depiction of gender roles. Pauline Kael, for one, notes that women go to the gym only in order to remain physically attractive and appealing to men.2 Early in the film, while Danielle is giving Louise a massage while waiting for their friends to arrive at the gym for their collective workout, the latter complains, ‘Oh, to be slim, young and attractive ... I’m forever on a diet. I weigh myself every morning. I’m terrified of getting flabby. My problem is I was born in the wrong era. I was made to be fat. My grandmother never did anything more strenuous than play the organ in church. She was an enormous woman who loved to

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eat and drank vermouth with her sugar donuts. In those days, men liked their women big.’ This passage supports Kael’s point insofar as Louise recognizes that she must exercise to remain slim. But these lines also evoke something else, namely, the disappearance of a certain idea of femininity. The reference to the big women that men used to love, albeit a cliché, implies that the women who could appeal to men have now vanished. And this is the fundamental change that patriarchy is incapable of accepting. The feminine, that which is the necessary other of patriarchy, has ceased to exist. It is no coincidence, argues Heinz Weinmann in his philosophical reading of Le Déclin, that the film’s principal location is near a lake. Water, Weinmann notes, is the element of death, ‘especially feminine death. Ophelia floating like the red autumn leaves of the film, floating and drowning in the nocturnal lake.’3 One of the assertions implicit in Le Déclin is that the feminine is dead. Angéline Martel contends that Arcand ‘shows how men and women are learning to live separately, because women have now adopted the traditionally masculine trait of independence. Men have not changed; women have; and that’s the decline. “There are no more role models,” says Arcand near the conclusion of the film. Not exactly. There are no more “women” in Le Déclin.’4 The best formal representation of the separation of genders happens one hour into the film, when the women arrive at the luxurious country house where their male friends await them. Arcand shot and edited the reunion scene explicitly like a duel in an old western between two opposing clans: the men screen right, looking off-screen left; the women screen left, looking off-screen right.5 Shot-reverse-shots foreground both groups staring at, and walking towards, each other with blank expressions on their faces. But rather than drawing their six-guns and killing one another – as they would probably like to do – they meet in a middle shot, embracing and kissing in a fabulous display of hypocrisy. Gender relations might seem to have improved, but this short

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sequence asserts that men and women remain miles apart. While the growing distance between women and men, and the fiction of their increased proximity, is made manifest through this and other formal strategies, Martel’s insight that there are no more women in Le Déclin demands closer scrutiny. Beyond their humour, the sexual anecdotes that comprise the first sixty minutes of the film exhibit two central characteristics with regard to gender. First, the men in the kitchen talk almost exclusively about women from other nations, women who are not there, women who have disappeared. Even on those occasions when they tell stories about ‘local’ women, they are nameless mistresses, anonymous love-struck students, or trivial one-night stands; all women who are not actively there. Second, the women who are there, the four friends chatting at the gym, adopt the same attitude as their male counterparts. I will return later to this second point. For now, let us examine the absent woman in the men’s discourse. The film opens on a close-up of a young Asian woman listening to her professor, Rémy, who explains that ‘three things are important in History: first of all, numbers; secondly, numbers; and thirdly, numbers.’ Associating the notion of ‘numbers’ to Asia in the first two shots of the film is a cleverly expedient rhetorical tactic to make a simple but accurate observation on late twentieth-century demographics. But Arcand does more with these first shots – or less, depending on one’s perspective on the ideological value of the film – than commenting on the ineluctable shift of power away from the west, and America in particular, towards the east. He introduces this Asian student to allow for a momentous segue in a dialogue between Rémy and Pierre a few minutes later. After the opening credits that follow the brief prologue in Rémy’s classroom, we hear Dominique giving an interview to Diane on her new scholarly book, Changing Concepts of Happiness, in which she argues that

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2.1. The gender duel. Le Déclin de l’empire américain. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

2.2. First shot of Le Déclin de l’empire américan showing an Asian student. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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the decline of an empire is always accompanied by growing individualism and hedonism. There follows a scene at the country house in which Pierre and Rémy discuss a surprising flaw in Dominique’s recent publication: the lack of a serious discussion about the fact that ‘women’s rise to power has always been linked to decline.’ The absence of women in Dominique’s book offers an early hint of the situation that will develop throughout the film, in spite of the seeming presence of a female voice in the dialogues among Dominique and the other women. Arcand sees this reference to growing female power and societal decline as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek jab at feminism,6 and his male characters, similarly, consider the issue ultimately inconsequential. Picking up on the idea of women’s rise to power, Rémy quickly drops the academic topic and zeros in on what really matters: ‘speaking of feminine power, you should see the Vietnamese girl in my class!’ From that point on, until the arrival of the four women at the country house, anecdotes among the men focus almost exclusively on women characterized by their structured absence from the film’s diegesis. Significantly, the Vietnamese student is never seen again after the opening shots. Therefore, the film’s first few minutes make a crucial point about gender relations: in spite of the seeming presence of female characters, there are no actual women in Le Déclin. The film begins by foregrounding female power (through the Asian student and Dominique’s erudite interview) and raises the issue of feminism’s impact on society (‘women’s rise to power has always been linked to decline’). But almost immediately, it dismisses the importance of feminism altogether and shifts to traditional masculine perceptions of women as sexual targets (the Asian student becomes a mere object of orientalist desire for Rémy and Pierre, and Dominique’s book, along with the argument it does not make about women, vanishes from the film’s discourse for the next hour). Powerful women disappear and what is left is a vague impression of the feminine.

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The most obvious example takes place about halfway through the film, when the men fantasize about the aromas of exotic women: ‘The Jewesses’ and Arabs’ fragrance of camphor. The Vietnamese with their scent of orange blossoms. Gets me excited.’ Scent in its evanescence is a not too subtle analogy for the elusiveness of the female lovers they imagine. Not only are the women they fantasize about exotic, but they are also impossible. Minutes before the four women arrive, Rémy describes the three types of woman he would need in addition to his own wife in order to be happy. ‘To be happy, I’d need 4 wives. Four, exactly as the Koran says. I’m very happy with Louise, but I’d also take a writer, say Susan Sontag, an Olympic high jumper and a real sex maniac for group encounters.’ The utter inaccessibility of three of these four women finds an intriguing metaphor in an earlier scene, when Rémy talks about the task of giving a woman an orgasm. ‘You have to find her clitoris. A delicate undertaking. Like looking for a needle in a haystack.’ As Weinmann points out, this joke denotes, in fact, the disappearance of the clitoris, which is thought to be so small that it becomes non-existent;7 like the women the men fantasize about. The men’s desire for irrevocably inaccessible women in Le Déclin is reminiscent of a tendency Arcand himself had criticized in earlier Quebec films. In 1964 Arcand wrote an article about sexuality in the cinema in which he discussed, among other works, Claude Jutra’s À tout prendre (1963). In Jutra’s film, the main character, Claude (played by Jutra), is involved with a black woman, Johanne (Johanne Harelle). For Arcand, Jutra’s focus on Claude’s interracial relationship with Johanne betrays an immature taste for the exotic. Nationalist maturity, for Arcand, would lead the young Québécois to seek a woman from Quebec, a real woman, an everyday woman. Jutra’s Claude should have dropped the ‘foreigner’ and found instead a woman named ‘Yvette Tremblay or Yolande Beauchemin.’ It is only when the Quebec man will finally be able to approach his female counterpart with love and tenderness that

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‘we will be able to have, as Jean Renoir proposes, a cinema that is at once free and fiercely national.’ Arcand concludes by stating straightforwardly that, if Jutra’s film were more insightful, ‘it would have ended with Johanne’s death.’8 Gilles Groulx’s 1964 Le Chat dans le sac came closer to Arcand’s ideal, as the main character, another Claude (Claude Godbout), chooses to break up with his exotic Jewish girlfriend (Barbara Ulrich), and develops an attraction for a French-Canadian woman who is only seen skating in a rural landscape. More than twenty years later, the men of Déclin display the same immature interest in the exotic as Jutra’s Claude and still seem incapable of approaching real women as equals. With age, Arcand might have become somewhat more forgiving about the immature Québécois’s lust for mysterious, ethnic women; as mentioned above, he does have some affection for his characters. But fundamentally, his perception of French-Canadian men as being unable to deal with actual women remains as patent in 1986 as it was in 1964. The one lover for whom Rémy seems to have felt genuine fondness epitomizes this fixation on inaccessible gender alterity. Barbara Michalski, an American scholar who specialized in the impact of working women on Chicano families, embodies the desire for the disappeared woman. As he tells the story, Rémy is seen in a flashback longingly looking at Polaroid pictures of Barbara taken during the one week they spent together in the Baja. The end of the story focuses on her disappearance. ‘What became of her?’ asks Claude. Rémy responds: ‘I don’t know. We used to phone each other. Then she disappeared. Probably married some dumb Mexican. Whenever I’m in the library I look for her name in psychology journals. I’ll probably never see her again. I think about her a lot.’ As he concludes on a pseudo light-hearted ‘How tragic!’ he turns on a food processor whose annoying sound breaks the wistful tone of the reminiscence. This ironic jolt is necessary, I would argue, to diminish the romantic power of the scene. So enraptured is

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Rémy with his nostalgia for Barbara that he could not shift back to his humorous accounts of other affairs without the rough break caused by the food processor. The impact of Barbara’s absence is emphasized by the fact that we see her only in still photographs, not in a live-action flashback. Her image, arrested in time, endows her absence with almost mythic power. Significantly, the flashbacks that accompany the men’s stories never show the men interacting with these other women. They show interactions either among men or with one of their four female friends. There is an intriguing logic to the flashbacks. While Claude’s recollection of his homosexual escapades show some of his nameless lovers (or potential lovers, to be exact), and flashbacks illustrating some of the anecdotes told by the women show intercourse among male and female characters beyond the eight central figures, the flashbacks associated with the heterosexual male anecdotes show them having relations only within their immediate circle of female friends. Pierre is seen talking with only one woman outside that circle, the heavily made-up and bejewelled Madame (Évelyn Regimbald) at the massage parlour where he met Danielle. Neither his ex-wife nor any of his multiple mistresses are ever glimpsed. Rémy’s, one interaction with a woman in a flashback occurs when he attempts to find a prostitute for a visiting scholar from Africa, Mustafa (Jean-Paul Bongo). The prostitute (Alexandre Rémy) he encounters turns out to be a man in drag. This is one of the most humorous scenes of the film. First, Rémy suggests to the prostitute that having sex with his black friend would be a gesture of generosity towards Africa comparable to signing in ‘We Are the World.’ The punchline follows, with the surprise revelation that ‘she’ is a he, as Rémy aptly responds, ‘Oh boy!’ The more significant aspect of the scene, however, is Rémy’s failure to realize that this ideal woman, ‘this gorgeous blonde,’ is, in fact, a man. That Rémy, who has slept with hundreds of women – or so we are led to believe – could not

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2.3. Rémy longing for Barbara Michalski. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

2.4. Rémy is fooled by a drag queen. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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tell the difference between a woman and a drag queen is of crucial importance. At the same time as it reasserts the absence of real women, it also illustrates that the women with whom Rémy and the others interact have become men in drag. This is Martel’s point. Since he speaks from the position of the very patriarchy whose decline he is exposing, Arcand cannot help but construct female characters that embody a patriarchal perspective on mid-1980s feminism. For Arcand and all the other 1980s men who see their patriarchal certainties challenged by feminism, ‘women have become men’9 There are numerous other minor hints peppered throughout the film that insinuate that independent 1980s women – from the point of view of patriarchy – have become men in drag and that ‘real women’ have vanished. For instance, after Claude’s story about cruising on Mont-Royal, in the saunas of Los Angeles, or the heaviest bars of St Pauli in Hamburg, he adds disparagingly, ‘Knowing I have to be home at 6, ’cause the old lady has supper waiting would kill me.’ Rémy interjects, ‘the old lady or the old man.’ To which Claude tellingly replies, ‘Same thing.’ Later in the film, when Rémy complains to Alain (Daniel Brière) of having to go to discos to seduce women, the three professors start dancing and impersonating the insipid conversations they must have with potential lovers. The dance scene is one of the most amusing moments in the film, as Rémy Girard, Yves Jacques, and Pierre Curzi do a wonderful job of conveying the joyfulness of these three old friends indulging in a bit of silliness. As part of the playfulness of the scene, Pierre shifts gender when Rémy says ‘What’s your view on serial monogamy, Sylvie? Nathalie? Julie? Sophie?’ At each female name, Pierre responds with feminine sighs and looks seductively, with open mouth, at Rémy. At the end of the number, Claude and Pierre rub against each other as they feign orgasm. The implication here is that men and women have become interchangeable. In fact, Rémy all but concedes that he would prefer to dispose of

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2.5. Pierre as Nathalie, Julie, Sophie ... © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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women altogether and simply be with men. He would have a problem only with kissing a moustached mouth. Joking about sexually transmitted diseases, he proposes that AIDS is the only serious disadvantage to being gay. Without AIDS, ‘homosexuality would be paradise on earth.’ The main advantage of being gay, of course, is ‘the joy of living with someone who doesn’t menstruate. Louise turns into a monster 4 or 5 days a month.’ Heterosexual men thus choose to be with women, says Rémy, only because they are not attractive enough to be gay: ‘a truly superb teenage boy looking in the mirror must think “This is too good for a woman!”’ This even applies to the fifth man who joins the group briefly: Mario (Gabriel Arcand), Diane’s working-class boyfriend, an ‘unbelievable sado-masochistic rocker,’ as Arcand has described him.10 On the surface, Mario is in complete contrast to the four intellectuals. He is tough, a real Québécois who speaks joual rather than standard French, does not indulge in foreign foods and prefers domestic beer over expensive imports.11 More important, he does not merely talk about sex; he actually fucks: ‘when I’m horny, I fuck,’ he tells the eight petits bourgeois during his three-minute appearance at the dinner table, before leaving and being quickly followed by Diane. However, in spite of his ‘rugged masculinity,’ there remain significant elements of his character that link him to the other men. First, his tough guy persona is queered, as it were, rendered ‘unbelievable,’ by the fact that he wears mascara. Furthermore, he is explicitly aligned with Claude. Earlier in the film, when he shows up looking for Diane before the women have arrived at the country house and comes in for a glass of water, he has a ‘moment’ with Claude when they stand side by side in a shoulder shot. Claude sizes him up, while Mario lets himself be looked at. They exchange a few words. ‘Are you on medication?’ asks Claude as Mario swallows a few pills. ‘A home remedy. It’s real strong.’ ‘I take multi-vitamins,’ adds Claude. ‘Must be good for you,’ responds Mario. They both chuckle, before Mario leaves.

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2.6. Mario and Claude enjoy a moment. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine

What emerges from this moment is the impression of a ‘subtext.’ While the dialogue is rather inconsequential, it is clear that both men know that there is something else going on between them; they understand each other. Later, when Mario appears during the dinner, he again is visually associated with Claude as they sit side by side. The exchange is again innocuous but the impression of a coded narrative remains, especially when Claude pours Mario an imported beer. The exchange of looks, and Mario’s questioning Claude’s taste in beer – ‘what’s with this beer ... you like this?’ – evokes again a peculiar game of seduction between the two men. More significantly, however, Mario’s sexual interest in men is expressly stated by Diane earlier in the film. ‘He’s never made love to me normally,’ Diane confides in Dominique, ‘always from behind, like a man.’ That Arcand specifically chooses this formulation – rather than simply saying that Mario enjoys penetrating Diane anally – has the effect of turning Mario and Diane’s S&M affair into what is essentially a relationship between two men, in which ‘the power of the victim is incredible.’ Not surprisingly, critic Denise Pérusse has recognized the ‘link between the homosexual and the masochist Diane.’12 Denis Bellemare has observed that Diane’s physical exercises during this bit of dialogue mimic the humiliating positions that she masochistically enjoys under Mario’s dominance, with close ups on her bottom and movements that emulate how Mario pulls on her hair.13 Mario does not even need to be there for her to perform her role as ‘bottom’ in a gay relation. This gives a visual equivalent to Diane’s status as nothing other than Mario’s homosexual object. As Weinmann says, Mario ‘denies woman.’14 All of this adds up to the construction of two types of women: the absent women, those that the men fantasize about; and the women who are present in the film: the drag queen, Pierre as Sophie, Julie, Nathalie, the overly made-up Madam, and the four women working out at the gym, all of whom are ultimately men. Women have become men and

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now, paradoxically, can only masquerade as women. Indeed, while Dominique, Diane, Danielle, and Louise are biologically female, they come across more often than not as men in drag. As already mentioned, Diane’s sexual activities with Mario put her in the position of a homosexual man. Dominique is also correlated to male homosexuality. When Claude talks about his cruising experiences, he notes, ‘I’m always being robbed. Guys take off with records, wine, my watch.’ Less than ten minutes later, while talking about affairs she had in Italy, Dominique says: ‘I was continually being robbed. The guys would take my passport, my traveller’s cheques, my watch.’ The almost exact repetition of the sentence spoken earlier by the gay man creates an unmistakable connection between Claude and Dominique. The point here is not that the gay man has a special connection to women. Rather, it is that the women resemble the men and, in fact, Dominique is the most clearly masculine female character. She is an intellectual, head of the history department, has money and power, and has no interest in children. Late in the film, she tells Alain why she suddenly revealed to everyone, and to Louise in particular, that she had had an affair with Rémy. This revelation is the turning point of the drama, as it shatters Louise and Rémy’s relationship. We find out in Les Invasions barbares, seventeen years later, that it led to their separation and that Rémy lost touch with his children. Dominique explains that she wanted to get back at the housewife for having dared to challenge her depressing theory on the decline of the empire. ‘Well, I don’t agree,’ the naive stay-at-home mom had retorted in response to the full professor’s taped lecture. ‘Just because you choose to live all alone and sacrifice your life to a career doesn’t mean that if I am lucid I have to be depressed.’ The term Dominique uses, which is lost in the English translation ‘I wanted to get back at her,’ is ‘je voulais la planter.’ Literally translated as ‘I wanted to plant her,’ it is more accurately rendered by the expression ‘I wanted to knock her lights out,’ which evokes the sort of language that would be used by

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boys in a schoolyard scrap. Not only does the expression masculinize her, but when we remember that Pierre, Claude and Rémy all display their cowardice at some point,15 it defines her as the only character who can aggressively stand up for herself. Indeed, Dominique is the most powerful character of the group. Weinmann argues that Pierre’s and Rémy’s inability to talk to Dominique directly about her new book – ‘you haven’t said a word about the book,’ she tells them – betrays their penis envy; their envy of her penis.16 As head of the department, she is their boss, and as the only member of the group who has published books, she exerts an ascendancy over the ‘word’ that reasserts her role as the patriarch. Michael Dorland, in his review of Le Déclin, agrees that she is the strongest figure of the group. He writes that ‘the hero of the film [is] the brilliant, cynical, world worry-weary Dominique. Then there are the women: the naive neurotic Louise, the sado-masochist Diane, and the millenarial masseuse Danielle.’ Dorland’s formulation is telling: he does not even include Dominique as one of ‘the women’ at all. In fact, Dorland does not consider ‘the women’ to be human beings: ‘except for Dominique whose intellectual and sexual ironizing sets her apart from the others, the women are machines. Just to make this perfectly clear, Arcand shoots them working not terribly hard at bodybuilding, but all the same as mechanical appendages to apparatuses.’17 Rather than machines, I see ‘the women’ as men in drag, and this is made clear during the flashback of Pierre and Danielle at the massage parlour. At first, Danielle is seen dressed in a kimono and made up to look like a geisha. She massages Pierre while talking about history and its calming effect. After the innocuous massage is completed she asks in a businesslike way: ‘Do you want the special? ... $25 for manual, $40 for oral. I don’t go further.’ He takes the manual. As she begins the procedure, she starts talking of milleniarism. She gets so interested in this topic that she disregards her ‘professional’ duties and forgets to take off

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her clothes. Once undressed, she resumes her talk on the year 1000 as she absent-mindedly gives Pierre a hand job. What the mechanical gesture reveals is not so much that Danielle is a machine, but rather that she is a man who makes ‘himself’ up like a geisha to service other men. One hand on Pierre’s penis, the other on her hips, she stands assertively delivering a lecture. A close-up of her breasts followed by a pan that reveals her forearm vigorously moving up and down replicates visually the passage from the ‘feminine’ to the masculine, as the forearm accompanies her verbal expression of knowledge. Like a shy schoolboy, Pierre timidly raises is finger to interrupt the lecture and says: ‘Excuse me, I am about to come.’ At that moment Danielle re-adopts the feminine persona, her hand delicately resting on her chest, rather than assertively on her hips, and finishes the job in silence while tenderly looking at her client. As Pierre says, ‘Thank you miss,’ the feminine performance goes even further as she brings her hands together and bows as she softly says: ‘My pleasure, Sir.’ This scene is a remarkably effective illustration of how the fantasy of orientalist femininity, which characterizes the man’s discourse, is superimposed upon the ‘reality’ of Danielle. Underneath the masquerade of the submissive geisha, when she acts as herself, Danielle – a name which, like Dominique, can be either feminine or masculine (Daniel is actually the name of the actor who plays the male student Alain) – has the manly demeanour of the young scholar eager to learn about history, demographic methodology, statistics, and computers.18 As Pierre says in voice over that it is at that moment he ‘fell head of heels in love,’ we see Danielle’s made-up face through a mirror reflection, indicating that the object of Pierre’s love is imaginary. Dorland argues that ‘Danielle seems not to have much of a personality.’19 In fact, it is because she is generally limited to performing the role of Pierre’s girlfriend – the quiet, servile geisha. Only rarely is she allowed to be an independent character.

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2.7. Danielle masturbating Pierre while lecturing him on milleniarism. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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In addition to the massage parlour lecture, on another occasion she asserts herself in response to Louise’s stereotypification of the ‘poor girls’ who work as masseuses. Repulsed by the idea that Pierre could go to such places, and unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that Rémy might ever indulge in such practices, Louise says: ‘Don’t you realize the lives those poor women lead? How they are forced to work there? You might as well be a rapist. It’s just as bad. Those poor girls ... they need help.’ In a rare moment of forcefulness, Danielle asks almost confrontationally, ‘How do you know?’ compelling Louise and the audience to at least consider that our idea of the ‘poor women’ who work there might be misguided. Louise can only respond that she’s ‘seen stories on them,’ acknowledging implicitly that this information might be fictional.20 The only other time Danielle sheds the mask to some extent occurs when the couple goes to bed, near the end of the film. She says she would like to have a child with Pierre, but not because of maternal impulse. Rather, a child would be a reminder of Pierre after the inevitable end of their relationship, probably in two years, which is the lifespan of romantic love according to him. That she knows about love’s expiry date and that she can look Pierre straight in the eye as they exchange vacuous I-love-yous, shows that she fully understands the situation. As the scene closes on Pierre’s facetious joke that she is only after his body, she elbows him vigorously, attacking his masculinity: ‘you can hardly get it up.’ This interchange comes immediately before Dominique’s admission that, like a schoolyard bully, she wanted to knock out her opponent. That Danielle must play the role of the orientalist female ideal is not surprising, given the discourse held by the men through the first hour of the film. What is more surprising, but ultimately logical given Arcand’s perspective from the position of declining patriarchy, is that the women are equally orientalist insofar as they are erotically fixated on ethnic others – perhaps even more so than the men. After they have

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condescendingly and hypocritically listened to Louise’s tale of the suburban swapping party,21 Diane and Dominique start telling stories of their own sexual adventures. Dominique relates an anecdote about having sex with two black men from Martinique. Imitating their thick accent – something that even the men do not do when talking about exotic women or Mustafa, who is referred to as a nèg’22 but is not ridiculed in the same way – she describes their pathetic attempts at machismo. Diane immediately interrupts that among blacks, Africans are the best – excluding Mustafa, who has been chasing her. But they both seem to agree that Italians are superior lovers, although they are simple souls who, like Mexicans, shout ‘Mamma’ when they come. Conversely, the less sophisticated Louise can offer only tales involving a local man, François, with whom nothing actually happened. Diane and Dominique’s focus on the ‘other’ as object of desire and of difference is primarily a masculine mode of identification. According to many gender theorists, while women identify with others through a process of continuity and connection, men construct their sense of self through separation and differentiation. As Carol Gillian argues, ‘for boys and men, separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity since separation from the mother is essential for the development of masculinity. For girls and women, issues of femininity or feminine identity do not depend on the achievement of separation from the mother or on the progress of individuation. Since masculinity is defined through separation while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened by separation.’23 If Gillian’s theory is correct, then what Diane and Dominique do throughout the first hour of the film, constantly commenting on foreign men as separate others to desire and ridicule, either undermines their identity as women or asserts their identity as men; the result is ultimately the same. This masculine perspective on identity as difference and separation

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is illustrated in a clever little scene, exactly halfway through the film, when Rémy takes Alain into his home office to show him the ‘Heteropteryx of Borneo.’ As the professor explains to the teaching assistant, the two very different-looking insects, pinned side by side in a display case, presented a challenge to entomologists, for they could not find the female counterpart of the one nor the male counterpart of the other. ‘Until one day they were found screwing. The 2 of them. He was the male to her.’ Alain is dumbfounded. How can two such different creatures be of the same species? ‘They have one thing in common,’ explains the mentor: ‘fucking.’ The metaphor is obvious: men and women are entirely different, and only through some freakish coincidence do they happen to be sexually connected. The scene is important in many ways. Most obviously, that the professor would use all the verbal and gestural rhetoric of erudition to lecture the attentive pupil on the topic of ‘fucking,’ is the source of much humour. More important, however, it offers a metaphor of how, from the perspective of patriarchy, males and females are entirely different. But the final shot of the short scene invites the audience to put a different spin on this interpretation. As a close-up shows us the heteropteryx couple for a few extra seconds, the radical differences between the two all of a sudden appear not to be so radical at all. As the shot lingers, the spectator – perhaps more so, the female spectator24 – starts perceiving similarities. Both have two pairs of wings, three pairs of legs, two antennae, and both are from Borneo. Indeed, they have much in common. These commonalities, however, do not take the simplistic form of one insect mirroring the other. Rather, the insects are at once similar and different, like men and women. But through a patriarchal lens, this play of contrast and similitude disappears in favour of the binary opposition observed by Rémy. Patriarchy wants men and women to be entirely different and to have nothing in common other than fucking. This is why, when women start adopting masculine traits such

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2.8. The professor lectures the student on the highly erudite topic of ‘fucking.’ © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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as independence, knowledge, and power, the patriarchal narrative can no longer conceive of them as actual women. Rather, they become, like Dominique and Diane, men in drag whose interests and preoccupations are no longer feminine but masculine. Furthermore, if the ‘major preoccupation’ for a man is his penis, then Dominique and Diane are definitely ‘men,’ for they speak much more about this topic than Claude, Rémy, and Pierre ever do. An entire scene, taking place in a hot tub, is devoted to it: Dominique, Diane, and even Danielle discuss men’s fixation on the size of their genitals and playfully come up with euphemisms to describe men’s shortcomings. Significantly, the women agree that the penis is indeed a crucial concern. ‘I mean it’s pretty important,’ says Dominique. ‘How can you say that?’ predictably responds Louise. ‘If you’re in love, it’s a detail.’ ‘Some detail!’ adds Diane. Dominique, Diane, and to a certain extent Danielle adopt a masculine attitude towards the phallus, insofar as their own concept of masculine identity revolves entirely around the penis. In one passage, for instance, when the women speak of ways to insult men, Dominique explicitly conflates a whole man with his penis. After an especially welltimed reference to a former lover, ‘you can feel him turning to mush,’ observes Dominique. The line in French, which is not exactly translated in the subtitle is, ‘Tu le sens en dedans qui devient comme de la gelatine,’ which means literally: ‘you can feel him inside turning to mush.’ The line implies at once that the woman can feel the man losing his erection inside her, and that the man, himself deeply upset, turns to mush inside. The penis and the man are one and the same. In this dialogue, Louise is much more generous towards males than her friends are, arguing that one cannot throw such insults at men. Similarly, in the previous scene, when Dominique speaks of the poorly endowed Sicilian policeman, Louise is quick to say ‘poor man.’ In fact, throughout the film, Louise almost always says what a man would expect a woman to say; she acts the way a man would expect a woman

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2.9. The heteropteryx of Borneo. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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to act. She is naive, sexually modest, patient, and understanding; she is afraid of a sinister-looking diver in the pool at the gym; she would even be willing to accept that Rémy might have had ‘flings now and then, on his trips.’ Thus, Louise is like Danielle dressed as a geisha: she is the docile and servile feminine. The only difference between Danielle and Louise is that, while the former is aware that she is in drag, the latter does not know she is playing a role. The one time Louise dares to rise above her station is when she challenges Professor Saint-Arnaud’s theory. As Dominique, in revenge, reveals the ‘secret,’ a close-up of Louise shows her face frozen in shock, disbelief, and realization. She slowly stands up and her face disappears from the frame, figuratively removing the mask of the loving housewife. The feminine has died. As Weinmann explains, the nightmare Louise experiences shortly after the revelation represents a symbolic death, as she is dragged to the bottom of a pool by a dark, menacing scuba-diver, a reference to the earlier scene at the gym when she encountered a scary frogman.25 This is the ‘feminine death,’ as Ophelia vanishes in the watery grave. It is no coincidence that immediately after Louise’s symbolic demise, Claude is seen giving a lecture on the representation of the hour of death in art. ‘There are painters of the night like Rembrandt or Georges De La Tour,’ he explains, ‘but there are few who paint the dawn. Dawn is the hour of death, the hour of sea-grey light. There is Géricault and above all Caravaggio.’ The allusion to death partly refers to Claude’s own health issues. He is seen urinating blood in a scene early in the film and the possibility that he may have AIDS is brought up elsewhere, when Rémy asks him outright about it. However, the issue of death is most clearly raised in relation to the sequence that immediately precedes Claude’s lecture, in which Louise ‘dies.’ In any event, Claude seems never to have been infected with AIDS, since he reappears seventeen years later, alive and well in Les Invasions barbares, in which it is Rémy who is dying; Arcand

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himself has insisted that Claude’s disease was never AIDS.26 Ironically, certain gay critics have expressed disappointment that Claude did not die of AIDS in the years between Déclin and Invasions.27 What matters, I believe, is not so much whether Claude has AIDS, but rather that he is sick with an unknown disease, which connotes the state of epistemological despair in which this entire generation finds itself. The shots of early morning nature, accompanied by a forlorn nocturne on the soundtrack, intensify the impression of gloom that shrouds the scene. The desolate beauty of the September dawn conjures up visions of fatality: the death of Louise, of the feminine, of knowledge, of history. As the day breaks, things have changed and yet remain the same. Louise wears sunglasses so as to remain in eternal twilight. Rémy is now quiet and self-absorbed. But the others resume their chatter, gossiping about the sexual adventures of a colleague. As they dispute the details of the colleague’s affair, Pierre’s last line of the film is ‘Moi j’ai l’impression qu’on saura jamais vraiment le fond de l’histoire.’ The subtitle, ‘I guess we’ll never really know for sure,’ merely reflects the character’s observation that they will never find out the truth about the affair. The original line, however, is much more evocative, as it not only refers to the uncertainty about the colleague’s sexcapade, but also, and more notably, makes the claim that history, ‘l’histoire,’ is unknowable. Throughout Le Déclin, the word ‘histoire’ is used in French to talk about affairs. The terms ‘histoire de cul’ or ‘histoire de sex’ can connote at once the affair itself, gossip around the affair, and the history of sex. This is a clever way for Arcand to show how history, in its socio-cultural import, is eclipsed by the hedonistic individualism of the characters. Aside from his observations on gender relations, the filmmaker thus also comments on the disappearance of history behind individual ‘histoires de cul.’ And the history that is most significantly concealed is the history of Quebec, whose motto, ‘Je me souviens,’ seems to have lost all meaning for these historians.

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The Death of Quebec History

Arcand has claimed that there is ‘no reference to the fact that these are French Canadian or Québécois’ characters.’1 This is not, of course, the case, since there are explicit references to Quebec in the film. Brossard, a suburb of Montreal, and Université Laval, the oldest French-language university in the province, are mentioned in the dialogue. The cineaste sees those allusions as somewhat immaterial; what matters is not that Brossard is specifically named, but rather that Brossard is a suburb, away from the omnipresent, prying eyes of the big city. A French or American filmmaker would have come up with a different suburb, but the meaning of the reference would have remained the same. Perhaps. But other references cannot be so easily dismissed as irrelevant. The most significant mention of Quebec history is the appearance of Michel Brunet’s book Notre passé, le présent et nous (1976). Mario, after what we can assume to have been a night of virulent anal sex, becomes sentimental and romantic at daybreak and offers Diane a gift to which is attached a heart-shaped balloon. This is another instance of the film contradicting its characters, as Diane has earlier asserted that she does not love Mario and is interested only in the ‘power of the victim’ in their S&M games. Yet the way they kiss on this beautiful, peaceful morning shows them as a traditional, loving couple. After Mario has left, Diane shows the gift to Claude: it is Brunet’s book. Brunet was a cel-

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ebrated Quebec historian who had been Arcand’s professor during his days at the Université de Montréal in the early 1960s. The filmmaker has explained that he included the book as an homage to Brunet, who died shortly before shooting began.2 Ben-Z. Shek, in his insightful analysis of the use of history in Le Déclin, quotes from Brunet’s book to highlight the contrast between the real historian’s commitment to Quebec culture and the indifference of Arcand’s fictional historians: In the ‘Avant-Propos’ of this book, in which Brunet accentuates the collective notre and nous, and in contrast to the film’s flagrantly egocentric je, we read the following: ‘Quand une collectivité choisit d’ignorer son passé, c’est qu’elle refuse de faire face aux defies du présent et n’a plus l’audace de se bâtir un avenir.’ ... He ends his introduction by expressing his optimism – one free of illusion – in Quebec’s future and his desire to associate himself with those living in the present, yet conscious of the past: ‘La première grande solidarité entre nous, c’est celle que notre histoire commune a tissée.’3

Arcand’s characters are in complete opposition to Brunet. They do not share his enthusiasm for the province’s history, his devotion to the nation’s collective destiny, and his optimism in the future of Quebec. Nor does Arcand share this optimism. For him, post-referendum/postnationalist Quebec is slowly dying off. It is a ‘desperate nation’ among many other ‘countries [that] are a vanishing species.’4 He finds absurd the various attempts to force the survival of French: ‘You can’t defend a language. It determines its own life, and conscious actions can’t influence that one way or the other. It’s like the movement of continents. We can’t do anything about that. If English is going to be the dominant language of the 21st century, it will be like lava from a volcano. We will either be engulfed, or we will be engulfed while protesting.’5

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Arcand’s sense that Quebec is doomed does not take on the form of grandiloquent, apocalyptic premonitions, nor does his gloomy perspective on the eventual demise of the American empire. As a case in point, near the end of the film discussions around a possible nuclear war are nonchalantly speculative and surprisingly brief, as they are quickly interrupted by Rémy’s request to Pierre for a Valium. Conjectures on the end of the world as we know it are of little more significance than all the ‘histoires de cul’ related during the first hour of the narrative. Rather, it is in the details that Arcand expresses his fatalistic view. It is worth mentioning that, in fact, it is not Brunet’s book that we see on screen, but rather a ‘false book’6 with a different, more attractive cover than the actual publication. On the one hand, this ‘false book’ calls into question the tenets that its real counterpart puts forth. In fact, this fictional prop displayed by a fictional character might be said to fictionalize Brunet’s role as a historian, making him little more than another unseen character evoked in the narrative’s diegesis; like Robert Turmel, whose ‘histoire de cul’ is gossiped about at the film’s conclusion. More momentous is that not only does the book have a redesigned cover, but the title itself has been changed. Rather than Notre passé, le présent et nous, the title we see on screen is Notre passé présent et nous.7 However, what might very well be merely a typographical error is not immaterial, since rather than offering a succession of three related concepts – the past, the present and us – Arcand’s redesigned version of Brunet’s book blends past and present and therefore shows only two notions: the ‘present past’ (passé présent) and us. While Brunet’s title evokes the need to consider the past in order to understand our present, Arcand’s merger of past and present calls to mind Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodernist notion, popular in the 1980s, that history has collapsed, that it has lost its authoritative status as a master narrative.8 The postmodern end of history implies that the logic of causal progress from past to present to future and the hierarchic arrangement of events from cen-

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tral to marginal have lost their scientific legitimacy. So it could be argued that the postmodern condition identified by Lyotard, which Dominique, Rémy, and the others share with their contemporaries throughout the western world, entitles them to fuse history and ‘histoires de cul’ with impunity, for discursive hierarchies have now vanished. But there is something more Quebec specific to the scene. As Brunet’s ‘book’ is shown, Diane and Claude remain silent. The shot is held long enough for us to notice that the only sounds heard are those of birds, cicadas, crickets, and leaves rustling in the wind. While these ambient noises have their own significance, the soundtrack stresses particularly that the characters have nothing to say about Brunet. Other historians are afforded respect. Fernand Braudel and Arnold Toynbee are cited as models, whose significant accomplishments as historians are used precisely to counterpoint the failure of Arcand’s characters as scholars. ‘I know I’ll never be a Toynbee or a Braudel,’ says Pierre to Alain, ‘all I have left is sex or love. What’s the difference?’ Even Mustafa is referred to by Rémy as a ‘brilliant historian.’ But when Brunet comes up – silence. While Braudel’s work on the economic and social history of France, Toynbee’s lectures on the prospects of western civilization, and Mustafa’s research on Mossy culture are deemed to be admirable scholarly pursuits, Brunet’s study of French-Canadian history is not worth even a word of acknowledgement. If the entire western world in the 1980s is experiencing the postmodern end of history, the effect seems most acute in Quebec. It is not a coincidence that Jean-François Lyotard’s seminal La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir was originally written in 1979 as a report on scientific knowledge for the Quebec counsel of universities. If master narratives have been transformed into a plethora of minor narratives – ‘petits récits’ as Lyotard calls them,9 then the marginal and ultimately irrelevant histories of Quebec are indeed perfect examples of the post-

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3.1. Brunet’s history book is met with silence. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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modern end of History with a capital ‘H.’ At the same time as Lyotard was writing his report, essayists Michel Morin and Claude Bertrand were echoing his reading of Quebec society, noting that the separatist movement’s equation of the nation and the state was no longer tenable. While the nation arises from vibrant individual plurality and a multiplicity of ‘petites différenciations’10 – Morin and Bertrand’s intriguing equivalent to Lyotard’s ‘petits récits’ – the state is a necessarily authoritarian master narrative that has become sterile. For Morin and Bertrand, the nation-state is a creature of the nineteenth century that has disintegrated in the late twentieth century and is incommensurate with the various discourses, traditions, and customs that constitute the Quebec of 1979.11 Not surprisingly, Quebec’s teleological journey towards nationalist modernity came to an abrupt end in the following year, 1980. The failure of the referendum had a profound influence on Quebec’s nationalist intelligentsia. While in the 1960s there had been a surprising communion amongst the intelligentsia, the proletariat, and even some segments of the bourgeoisie towards the common goal of Quebec independence, in the 1970s a slow but ineluctable ideological fragmentation occurred among the people. This probably began with the October crisis of 1970, when nationalist intellectuals were perceived by many to have been too indulgent towards the FLQ’s radicalism. As Dominique Clift argues in Le Déclin du nationalisme au Québec (1981), the October crisis fractured the cultural cohesion that had, thus far, allowed French-Canadian culture to resist assimilatory pressures from anglophone surroundings: ‘it is as though the intelligentsia had lost its connection with the people.’12 Arcand himself started distancing himself from the working class at that time, after he completed On est au coton. Talking about his textile film, Arcand once said, ‘I made a film on the working class when I was 30. I explored that theme with as much honesty as I could, and came to the conclusion that nothing would ever

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change for the workers of North America, except that factories would keep on closing and an increasing number of workers would be out of work. The notion of the proletariat as a distinct class able to find its own solution to its problems is erroneous. That was the conclusion I reached in 1970 and today I still agree with that deduction.’13 The cleavage between intellectuals like Arcand and the lower classes continued as the 1970s unfolded and the master narrative of a unified, independent Quebec Nation-State further dissolved. Paradoxically – or maybe not – the victory of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois in 1976 precipitated the decline of nationalism. When the PQ took power it immediately lost its status as the ‘alternative’ and became the ‘establishment,’ which had the effect of alienating some militants. Suddenly, revolutionaries were sharing the same ideology as bureaucrats. As Clift notes, given this shift in perspective, nationalism itself became the ‘party line’ that had to be contested. Many groups that had traditionally supported the PQ started distancing themselves from the party’s ideology. Artists in general, and filmmakers in particular, were among those who switched their allegiance. According to Clift, women, perhaps more than men, turned their backs on institutionalized nationalism. In the late 1970s women started ‘to reject contemporary nationalism ... for it was now too close to centralized administration and bureaucracy.’ Feeling excluded from the governmental machine, ‘women started to lean towards individualism and seek more favourable social organizations.’14 It is perhaps no coincidence that in Le Déclin, Arcand correlates the death of Quebec nationalism with a profound transformation in womanhood. The failure of the PQ’s option at the 1980 referendum was the last blow to the nationalist narrative that had emerged in 1960 as the dominant discourse of the Quiet Revolution, but had vanished almost entirely twenty years later (although it would reappear with renewed vigor in 1990, following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord; but that

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is another story). The pulverization of the dominant nationalist narrative triggered a multiplicity of other priorities among the population of Quebec, including a great fervour for personal ‘comfort’ and a new openness towards the world and cultural otherness.15 The postmodern paradigm shift experienced throughout Europe and North America was thus greatly intensified in Quebec by the victory of the ‘NON,’ which exploded the dream of the nation-state and allowed for a plethora of other voices to emerge. Quebec might have lost its dream for independence on that fateful night in the spring of 1980, but as Fulvio Caccia writes in Republic Denied: The Loss of Canada, ‘Montrealers can be consoled by telling themselves that their city was the unrevealed starting point for postmodernism in the world!’16 Like postmodernism, the ‘signs of the empire’s decline’ itemized by Dominique late in the film might be apparent in all western cultures, but seem more intense in Quebec than elsewhere. ‘Society despises its own institutions, the birth rate keeps dropping, men refuse to serve in the army, the national debt is out of control, the work week is getting shorter, the bureaucracies are rampant, the elites are in decay’ – all these comments are used as evidence to support Professor SaintArnaud’s thesis. While the national debt and the decay of the elites might not have been worse in 1980s Quebec than in other nations, swelling bureaucracies, lack of trust in institutions, anti-militarism, and the plummeting birth rate were significantly more manifest in French Canada than in other regions. By the late 1980s reports on government bureaucracy were indicating that the civil service had become more cumbersome in Quebec than in other parts of Canada.17 Furthermore, a few years after the film’s release in 1991 Quebeckers were showing much less support for military action to defend ‘the empire’ in the Middle East than their anglophone counterparts.18 However, while being against colonial wars is certainly a positive trait of French-Canadian culture – it has always been a chal-

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lenge to convince the Québécois to fight in any war – it is important to note as well that Quebeckers are also less inclined to volunteer within their own community than others, perhaps attesting to the greater degree of self-indulgence in Quebec than elsewhere.19 By the end of the 1980s, a majority of Quebeckers had also lost confidence in the church,20 their financial institutions,21 their healthcare system,22 and their universities.23 But perhaps the most severe ‘sign of the decline’ in Quebec in the 1980s was the drop in birth rate.24 This decline is all the more indicative of a drastic change in Quebec culture that French Canada had long relied on its solid birth rate, its ‘revanche des berceaux,’25 to resist threats of assimilation from English-speaking North America. However, the traditional large French-Canadian families of yesteryear had all but disappeared from the Quebec landscape in the 1980s and, as Weinmann points out, Arcand’s characters reject kinship. Pierre, especially, has little contact with his parents and siblings, and refuses to have children. Even when the characters themselves show an interest in children, the film undercuts their position. For instance, when Diane expresses regrets about never having completed her doctorate and Louise tries to console her by saying that at least she has children, Arcand cuts to a flashback in which Diane’s daughter, Nathalie (Ariane Frédérique), bursts into her bedroom, surprises her in bed with Rémy, and angrily demands that he leave at once. As for Claude, his attempts to adopt a Cambodian child were futile, because social workers disapproved of his sexual orientation. For Weinmann, this rejection of the traditional family, of children, of life itself is the ‘deadliest’ sign of the decline, for the fewer francophone children are born, the closer Quebec comes to disappearing.26 Given the moribund state of the French-Canadian family, it is no coincidence that Arcand would associate Quebec culture with disease and mortality. In the scene in which Brunet’s ‘book’ is displayed, it is

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important to note that the shot immediately following the image of Notre passé present et nous shows Claude telling Diane about his health problems. ‘There was blood in my urine again,’ says Claude, ‘the bowl was full.’ ‘What is it?’ asks Diane. ‘They don’t know yet,’ he replies. That ‘they don’t know’ what Claude’s condition might be is another indication of the postmodern collapse of scientific discourse. But again there is more to it than that. This is the second time in the film that Quebec history is associated with Claude’s disease. The first time is when Claude is shown urinating blood in the toilet, which immediately follows a reference to the sermons of Mgr Ignace Bourget, a well-known French-Canadian priest of the nineteenth century. The point of the ‘Bishop Bourget’ passage is that it allows Rémy to argue that lying is central to all social interactions, from love affairs to academic conferences. ‘Refusing to lie,’ he explains, ‘would be much the same as telling an eminent colleague from Laval University who’s devoted years to the history of Catholicism in Canada that he can take Bishop Bourget’s sermons, roll them very tightly and slowly shove them up his ass.’ ‘Not Bishop Bourget’s sermons!’ says Claude. Rémy nods: ‘Instead you shake his hand warmly and say “very impressive.”’ The amusing irreverence of the scene is accompanied by a crucial bit of acting on the part of Yves Jacques. In response to Rémy’s joke, Claude mimics the pain that would be caused by having sermons shoved up his own ass. While his grimaces and body language are funny in and of themselves, that Claude is a gay man adds meaning to the gesture. That a gay character, who presumably enjoys anal sex, would grimace at the prospect of having Bishop Bourget’s sermons shoved up his ass demonstrates just how disgusting said sermons are. But Arcand adds another connotation to Claude’s reaction when he shows him going to the washroom seconds later and urinating blood. The brief succession of actions conflates Bourget’s sermons, anal sex, and disease. This conflation plays upon the homophobic link between homosex-

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uality, disease, and death in western culture. Traditional psychoanalytical interpretations of homosexuality tend to see anality in negative terms. As Diana Fuss remarks, ‘the psychoanalytic morbidification of homosexuality upholds and lends scientific legitimacy to a wide cultural view of gay sexual practices as inherently necrophilic.’27 To some extent, Arcand probably adheres to this conservative view of homosexuality. In his 1964 article on sexuality in cinema, discussed above, a young Arcand expressed homophobic tendencies in his reading of Jutra’s À tout prendre, in which the main character reveals his attraction towards boys. But it is also possible to read anal sex metaphorically, in a more positive light, as an experience that allows men to free themselves from the tyranny of masculinist individuation. The liberation that anal sex affords is still linked to death, but this is ‘death’ as George Bataille understood it. For Bataille sex and death mark a ‘radical loss of consciousness,’ which allows for transgressive sovereignty by breaking the boundaries of distinctive subjectivity.28 Leo Bersani, in his 1987 book AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, reads anal sex along these lines, as a practice that provides a grave in which the masculine ideal can bury itself. While Bersani’s theory has been challenged over the years, its contemporaneity with Arcand’s film makes it a relevant point of reference for this reading of Le Déclin. The abdication of power associated with being penetrated represents, for Besani, a means to undo phallocentricism by asserting ‘the value of powerlessness in both men and women.’29 Refusing to pursue a phallic, modernist movement forward (towards an independent nation-state, for instance) and withdrawing instead towards passive pleasures may afford a transcendence of the sadistic limits of hegemonic masculinity. Some feminists have contested Bersani’s interpretation of ‘beingpenetrated-ness’ as a shameful experience in pleasurable and liberating passivity. Carellin Brooks, for one, argues that, for female readers, one of

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Bersani’s statements ‘seems to carry within it the constellation of terror and shame that characterize the West’s cultural response to penetration: it is, as Bersani characterizes it, the “seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”’30 One can see why Bersani’s attempt to reclaim being-penetrated-ness through a celebration of negativity would irritate feminists. What is significant for my purposes, however, is that Bersani’s celebratory queerness mirrors Arcand’s fatalistic view of the future of patriarchal Quebec. As we have already seen, Le Déclin de l’empire américain narrates the decline of patriarchy triggered by the rise of feminism. The action of shoving Catholic sermons – an emblem of patriarchy if ever there was one – up the ass confirms at once the state of contempt in which patriarchy finds itself, the feminization of men and, by extension, the masculinization of women. That all of this is so explicitly linked to French-Canadian culture through the figure of Bishop Bourget emphasizes that this widespread situation is even more concentrated (‘[rolled] very tightly’) in Quebec.31 If there were but one instance where such associations appeared, then it might be a mere coincidence. However, that the only two occasions on which French-Canadian history is explicitly referred to correspond directly to the only two moments when Claude’s potentially serious illness is foregrounded suggests a conscious attempt on Arcand’s part to bury patriarchal Quebec in the grave of anal death. While a homophobic reading of this trope would interpret the death of patriarchy as a tragedy, Arcand does allow the spectator to understand it in more optimistic terms. The end of separatist masculinity can become an opportunity for a different kind of relationship among this community in decline. The last words of the film are Diane’s question to Claude, ‘You okay?’ and his response, ‘Yeah.’ This positive answer raises questions as the end credits start rolling. How can Claude, or any of his friends be ‘okay’ when ‘the end is nigh’? How can Danielle and

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Louise play a lively melody on the piano when the former’s wish to have a child is denied by her partner and the latter’s entire universe has just been shattered? How can Dominique and Alain fondle each other in the kitchen while the world around them is falling apart? How can any of them tolerate this state of cultural doom? How? By accepting that all they have is each other and the landscape around them. For Morin and Bertrand, the only way for Quebec to transcend the dead end of its nation-state teleology is to ‘reinvent culture through a new relationship with space, with the territory now free from its weighty identity ... a renewed relationship with the primordial other that nature is ... culture should be related again to natural elements, which alone can give it meaning.’32 This renewed association with nature, of course, goes hand in hand with the death of patriarchal subjectivity performed through nonsocially sanctioned sexuality, at least according to Bataille. In his book Georges Bataille (1994), Michael Richardson explains: In eroticism we merge back into nature as our body dissolves into that of the beloved. In this carnality, paradise is momentarily recovered and we merge into our surroundings as we interpenetrate with each other’s bodies and so any distinction between nature and culture vanishes. The denial of eroticism – which is particularly strong within our culture – is at the same time an attempt to deny and close out death and our connection with nature ... the element of disorder implied by eroticism [is] generally denied in two complementary ways: through restricting sexual activity to its reproductive function and upholding an ideal of chastity or through a legitimation of indulgence in animal sexuality, that is, by sanctioning libertinism and sexual promiscuity. For Bataille, libertinism was as much an emanation of the urge for the denial of eroticism as was puritan detachment.33

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In the Bataillean configuration, Rémy’s libertinism is as conservative as Louise’s chastity, for it is merely a variation on traditional sexuality. The only way to undo patriarchal individuation, discrimination, and separation is through the shattering of the historical subject that anality affords,34 as its transgressive eroticism reconnects us to each other and to nature. This connection to nature and to one another is exactly what redeems the cynical academics of Le Déclin. As Réal La Rochelle states, these characters have lost everything ‘except the warmth of human friendship and the uncanny beauty of nature.’35

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Friends in the Landscape, or Was Louise Right All Along? When I asked Arcand about the seeming hopelessness expressed in Le Déclin he responded: The most insightful analysis of The Decline I have ever read is a comment published in Saturday Night. The reviewer argues that critiques have focused too much on the spoken discourse of the film, at the expense of the visual and musical discourses. In his view, and I agree with him, these non-verbal enunciations convey that, while Canada might not have a very exciting history, there is a sense of peacefulness and serenity here; an immanent happiness that no one ‘talks’ about, but that is communicated through images of the landscape, of nature, of the beautiful houses that the characters inhabit. It is also in the friendship that unites those people. Beyond differences of gender, of age, of sexual orientation, they are all friends. There is a certain gentleness, a certain civility about the characters that counterbalances their cynicism. And it was part of the context of the production as well. Making this film was a very pleasant experience for me. We spent a month shooting in a wonderful location, with actors who were friends, and who enjoyed working on the film as much as I did, I think. During production we did not know if the film would have any success at all, and it was not really important. The

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pleasure of working together was what mattered. So the context and the subtext of the film converge and it is all part of the meaning of The Decline. But most people missed it.1

This lengthy comment hits on a number of points that explain why repeated viewings of Le Déclin remain a pleasurable experience in spite of its dire ‘message.’ The friendship of the ensemble cast, who take genuine joy in incarnating the friendship of their characters; the civility of the characters and the comfort they enjoy; François Dompierre’s beautiful variations on Handel’s music; and cinematographer Jacques Leduc’s stunning natural images all work together to communicate a general sense of happiness and even hopefulness to the audience. It is not insignificant that during the first hour of the film, the women are shown working out in an aseptic sports centre. If in Arcand’s web of associations the postmodern end of history and the collapse of patriarchy can be associated with the rise of feminism, it is normal that the men in drag who have replaced the ‘real’ women who have now disappeared, would be surrounded by the sterile machines whose barren gears represent the cultural cul-de-sac of Quebec society. The men, on the other hand, are afforded a much more congenial space. Helped by a realist mise en scène that tends to favour depth of field and long takes, the men can move fluidly in their warmly decorated domestic space, while the women are often framed more tightly in compositions cluttered by mechanical apparatuses. An instructive example of the different techniques used to present the men and the women is the sequence where Rémy and Louise talk about the same incident but from different perspectives. Louise reveals she had a crush on her tennis instructor, François (Robert Doutre), and how, on the day of her last lesson, she could not go to see him because of Rémy, whose car got stuck in the snow blocking the driveway. While Louise criticizes Rémy for ruining her last chance of seeing François just

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for sake of getting his ‘sacred’ New York Times – another sign of the character’s disregard for his own culture – Rémy characterizes Louise as a menstrual ‘monster’ who got angry at him for no good reason. While the juxtaposition of the two scenes is amusing because of the contrasting points of view, its most important effect is to manifest clearly the divergent compositions of the shots. Not only is Rémy’s anecdote related in the pleasant environment of the country house, but the camera also captures the four men in depth as they are distributed in space from the kitchen to the dinning room several feet deeper in the house. This composition, which highlights unity among the male characters, is a textbook example of Renaissance perspective marked by balance and proportion. Louise’s parallel narrative is told among exercise machines in the inhospitable gym. But more important, rather than using carefully designed depth of field, the scene is shot laterally, with the camera moving screen right to follow Louise’s movement from one exercise station to the next. This technique, which emphasizes shallow perspective, recalls what Gene Walz has labelled the ‘planimetric’ style of Arcand’s earlier fiction, especially La maudite galette.2 The flatness of the image creates a cold, distant, documentary effect, which clearly disadvantages her version. Furthermore, in this sequence the women are shown interacting together only through cramped two-shots, rather than the medium to long shots that the men are afforded. From the start, the men are granted leisurely environments and the women are stuck in an insipidly manufactured space. While Diane and Dominique’s first conversation takes place in the indifferent hallways of the university, Pierre and Rémy’s first chat about Dominique’s book and the young Vietnamese student takes place in the bucolic surroundings of the country house by the lake. Even when they are working out outside, Dominique and Diane are imprisoned in a dreary football stadium. The concrete and metal surroundings that weigh heavily on the

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4.1. In the mise en scène, men are afforded more freedom and space than women. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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women have a toxic effect on their chats. Conversely, the beauty of the natural environment redeems the dialogues of the men. In the scene where Pierre chats with Alain about his failure as a scholar compared with the success of Braudel and Toynbee, he also evokes Wittgenstein to justify his lechery. ‘Wittgenstein wrote that our only certainty is the ability to act with the body. If I am in love, I get hard. If I don’t get hard. I’m not in love. Otherwise you’re deceiving yourself. Like a woman who says she still loves you when she’s as dry as sandpaper and you remember how she’d be dripping if you so much as kissed her on the neck.’ The reliance on philosophy to justify an erection, the equation of love with a hard-on, and the judgment of a woman’s sincerity based on her degree of lubrication are rather dubious. Yet the peacefulness of the space and the civility of the men’s interaction in this environment make the most despicable comments sound pleasant. From Pierre and Alain’s scabrous conversation by the former’s country house, Arcand cuts to two men walking by the women in the gym as Diane looks at them and stares at the men’s behinds. That the two men are rather unattractive as they bend over is only the most shocking contrast from the pleasantness of the previous scene. In addition, the neon lighting of gym, the colourless walls, and, of course, the inhuman machines that clutter the space conspire to make this scene unappealing. Furthermore, it is here that women come across as most racist and disingenuous in their ‘amusing’ anecdotes as they ridicule people of other races. Only when they arrive at the country house are the women also redeemed by the natural surroundings. Not surprisingly, it is as the tone of the film becomes darker and increasingly cynical that the environment becomes most eerily attractive. As Freud, Marx, and the Pope get dismissed as perverts, romantic female fantasies are ridiculed, and the empire is laid to rest through Professor Saint-Arnaud’s ominous lecture, beautiful images of Lac

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Mephrémagog are shown and birds are heard in the background – the same birds that alleviate the embarrassing silence around Brunet’s book. As the group of friends move through the forest and on a pier and they enjoy being together in the landscape, their shallowness, their cynicism, their meanness, and their mediocrity are absolved by the lake, the trees, and the mist. Accompanying music plays a central role in the process, moderating the derisive tone of the dialogue. Not only does it assuage Dominique’s doomsday taped interview heard over shots of natures, it also romanticizes the relationship between Diane and Mario, as brief views of what seems to be rough intercourse are rendered almost tender by the soundtrack. Music and the landscape thus work together aesthetically not to prevent the morbid fate of the characters but rather to make their death bearable, even pleasant. Seventeen years later, Arcand literalizes this peaceful, serene death in a beautiful landscape accompanied by beautiful music in Les Invasions barbares, when he shows Rémy’s last moments on earth surrounded by his family and friends at the country house. But already in Le Déclin, the filmmaker’s point might be ultimately to show that, as much as resisting the inevitable is futile, there is a way to make pleasurable this unavoidable, tragic end. Ironically, this makes Louise the most insightful character of the bunch. After listening to Dominique’s account of the decline, Louise states her disagreement, saying that other scholars could probably argue the converse. ‘It’s impossible to understand the age you live in. All you can do is try to be happy,’ the naive housewife tells the erudite professor. ‘That’s what people have always wanted. The rest invent theories to justify their misery. You said so yourself.’ This viewpoint is reminiscent of a line spoken by Father Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier) in Jésus de Montréal. A sixty-year old priest who loves theatre and has good intentions but is cowardly, Leclerc cannot bear the criticisms voiced by religious authorities against the production of the passion play that he commissioned

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but that a troupe of radical young actors have taken in unforeseen directions. Browbeaten by his ‘superiors’ but empathizing with the young actors, he tries to convince the leaders of the group, Daniel Coulombe (Lothaire Bluteau) and Constance Lazure (Johanne Marie Tremblay), to simply forget about their performance. ‘They wore you down in the end,’ says Daniel to Father Leclerc. ‘It’s understandable,’ he replies, ‘institutions live longer than individuals. At my stage of the game, I think people should just live happily as long as they can.’ ‘There’s got to be more to life than just waiting for death as comfortably as possible!’ asserts Daniel vehemently.3 While Daniel comes across as the hero of the film, literally giving his life for his art, Leclerc’s line rings as true as Louise’s. And this is what enrages Dominique; it is not only that Louise dares to disagree with her, but also that she is right. When all is said and done, finding some happiness in appreciating nature, taking pleasure in friendship, or enjoying the arts is the only thing human beings can do. Those who can’t find happiness in such simple pleasures either become artists themselves if they have talent or, if they lack talent ... they become academics. For Réal La Rochelle, who has written extensively on the use of music in Arcand’s films, Déclin is a ‘tragédie en musique,’ where Dompierre’s variations on Handel function as something of a funeral euphony for dying intellectuals: ‘At the end of these 24 hours of tragédie en musique – here dawn is represented by a succession of barely tamed North American landscapes and slides of dawn paintings by Géricault and Caravgio – the moment of day’s first light signals the hour of death. There are no real corpses in The Decline, only the ruins of intellectuals, the living dead playing piano with four hands, ‘living remains’ which even a postgraduate autopsy would be hard pressed to identify.4 While there may not be corpses in the film, an earlier version of the screenplay had several references to friends and acquaintances having committed suicide, who jumped off buildings or shot themselves in the

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face.5 Arcand might have toned down his commentary on the death of intellectuals in the final script, but it remains implicit in the underlying morbidity manifested by his academics. However, beyond the theories of dying intellectuals, aside from their desperate attempts to justify their own failures, there are the things that last: landscape, music, art, space, movement. Peter Harcourt, in a brief but perceptive and deeply felt analysis of Le Déclin, writes: Whatever happens to the characters or whatever the political future of Canada and Quebec, like the music of Handel, the beauty of the landscape will remain ... Music never conceals or reveals: it is simply what it is, moving us or failing to, depending on our cultural conditioning. So too with the spaces – and so too with the extraordinarily graceful choreography of Denys Arcand’s mise-en-scène. All his spaces signify – from the prolonged tracking shot at the opening down the monumental arcade which may intimidate us to the presence of snow at the end which might console us, cleanse us, even Canadianise us; but most of all, assisted by that piano duet, the closing sequence restores us to our own feelings, setting us free from language, with all its wit and many selfdeceptions.6

The closing shots of the film, snow covering the country house, remind us indeed that when history has run its course, and ‘histoires de cul’ no longer amuse anyone, the snow will still be there, having its calming effect on whoever or whatever is left in Quebec. Denis Bellemare has also commented on the difference between the opening and closing credits.7 The opening credits present the spectator with the colossal arcade of the Université de Montréal, which literally dwarfs human beings; the teleological movement forward of the camera and the grandiose symphony that drowns individual voices. This

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4.2. The peaceful wintry environment that survives the decline. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

4.3. An image of architectural certainty. © Malo Films Inc. Courtesy of Seville Pictures.

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embodies the pretensions of academic discourse, its belief in eternal universalism, and its dedication to finding profound answers to the important questions it asks. The closing credits, on the other hand, show the house in winter through a few static shots as the human-scale piano duet plays in the background. Humanism, in all its ludicrously self-important ideals, is now replaced by the everyday reality of human existence. The beginning and end of the film thus trace a passage from the noble, albeit ultimately futile, aspirations of mankind to the minute realities that make life worth living.

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LES INVASIONS BARBARES

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T

he opening credits of Les Invasions barbares respond to Le Déclin in a suggestive way. As in Le Déclin, the credits of Les Invasions begin after a prologue. In the later film, the prologue introduces Rémy; his son Sébastien, now a futures trader living in England, talking with his mother Louise over the phone; as well as one of Rémy’s many mistresses (Sophie Lorain) ferociously arguing with the now bedridden, hospitalized womanizer. Before we continue, it is worth noting that there are two versions of Les Invasions barbares. A 112-minute version, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and distributed in Quebec, and a 98-minute version for the international market, both of which are available on DVD. The 98-minute version does not include the first scene at the hospital with the mistress screaming at Rémy, which makes the prologue significantly shorter. The exclusion of the ‘first mistress’ in the prologue and elsewhere in the 98-minute version obviously quickens the pace of the film. But I would also argue that it renders the narrative somewhat less negative in its depiction of women. The first mistress scene, like most other segments dropped from the longer version, emphasizes negative female behaviours. The longer version counts numerous other extra segments where women are denigrated (discussed below), including a scene in which the threat of violence against a woman is portrayed humorously. After the prologue, the credits begin. Very much unlike the views of monumental university architecture of Le Déclin, a tight shot on two hands holding a small ciborium on a table, with a bible screen left and a crucifix screen right opens the credits of Invasions. There follows an even tighter close-up on the hands taking a few hosts from the ciborium and putting them in a pyx. The grandiose music from Le Déclin begins. Cut to a woman, a nun (Johanne Marie Tremblay), who enters a hospital hallway. As soon as she starts walking down the hallway as the camera shadows her, Handel’s music is drowned by sinister echoes of

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hospital equipment, moans of pain, unintelligible mutters, and other eerie sound effects. The explicit reference to Le Déclin’s opening score and its subsequent distortion immediately suggests that the few academic certitudes the characters of the earlier film were still clinging to have completely vanished in the sequel. For Marie-Claude Loiselle, Arcand’s perspective no longer is merely cynical as in Le Déclin, but has now become ‘sinisterly disenchanted.’1 The visuals support this reading. The image of power and authority conveyed by the architecture and the assured tracking shot of the 1986 film is replaced here by an image of insecurity created by an uncertain camera moving sinuously in a narrow space cramped with decrepit bodies lying on small beds, health professionals rushing around, cables hanging from the ceiling, sacks of dirty laundry, and miscellaneous medical machines blocking the way. From the beginning of the film it is already too late: death is everywhere. After giving a host to a dying elderly woman on a stretcher parked in a corner, the nun continues her rounds in this environment that visibly stinks of mortality. As the opening credits conclude, the nun arrives in Rémy’s room, which he shares with three other men. She erroneously offers a host to a Hindu patient and mistakes Rémy for another man. She introduces herself as Constance Lazure, the actress from Jésus de Montréal who, after her fellow actor Daniel Coulombe died while playing Jesus, evidently chose to dedicate her life to the ‘real’ Jesus rather than to a theatrical simulacrum. Well intentioned though she may be, the nun immediately comes across as an ineffectual cog in a brokendown machine. Later in the film, Rémy lectures her on all the atrocities that her Church has condoned – from the butchery of millions of Native Americans to the horrors of Auschwitz – thus depicting an infernal machine that transcends the walls of the hospital.

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The closing shots of the film show that the only solution to this terrible state of affairs is to leave. The peaceful permanence of the snowy Quebec landscape that closes Le Déclin is replaced here by deeply nostalgic shots of an empty bench by the forsaken country house as a plane takes off, bringing Sébastien and his girlfriend, Gaëlle (Marina Hands), back to England. An insert of birds flying away suggests that even nature might have given up on Quebec. As the last words of the film are spoken, Gaëlle’s ‘I love you’ to Sébastien, Françoise Hardy’s bittersweet ballade, L’Amitié, enhances the profound sense of loss caused by Rémy’s death a few scenes earlier. Sébastien, who spends a good part of the film speaking English to his colleagues on his cellphone, is not the only one to have left Quebec. Sylvaine (Isabelle Blais), Rémy and Louise’s daughter, has already left the country to sail the world. Claude now lives in Italy and, as he tells Diane before returning home after the death of his friend, ‘since my mother died, I have no one here.’2 We also learn earlier in the film, when Sébastien contacts all of his father’s old pals to ask them to visit the dying man, that Dominique is away in Alaska and that Diane rarely goes to Montreal anymore. While human contact and nature were still a strong enough attraction to keep people in the province in Le Déclin, by the time of Les Invasions even those forces have lost much of their ascendancy. Rémy’s death is nothing less than an analogy for the death of Quebec. Arcand is not the only filmmaker to foresee the end of French Canada. One of his former colleagues from the NFB, cineaste and novelist Jacques Godbout, has predicted that Quebec, as we now know it, will have vanished by 2076.3 With its ‘génération lyrique’4 dying off and its most talented young people leaving for England and the United States or sailing around the globe, while the rest seek an escape from their meaningless existences in the dead-end world of drug abuse, as Diane’s

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daughter Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze) does, Quebec seems to be on its last legs. But as much as the film illustrates the death of French Canada, it avoids falling into dejected morbidity through the reassertion of certain lasting pleasures, such as friendship, art, music, and cinema.

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From an Obsession with Death to an Oscar Arcand had already dealt with death without being morose in Jésus de Montréal. Death in this film is not utilized as a sign of demoralizing futility. Rather, it appears as a statement on the need to perform momentous gestures that assert the power of the individual to change other people’s lives for the better. The film opens with a stage performance of The Brothers Karamazov in which a dashing young actor, Pascal Berger (Cédric Noël), plays a character about to commit suicide. As the character hangs himself as he tirades against god and his forsaken creation, the theatre audience bursts into enthusiastic applause. This prologue is used for a multitude of significant purposes. First and most obviously, it allows Arcand to poke fun at critics and sycophantic media types in general. As the stage performance ends, an ostensibly ruthless talent scout, Denise Quintal (Monique Miller), says, referring to Pascal, ‘I want his head.’ While what she means is that she wants to employ him as a male model for an ad campaign, the expression she uses immediately evokes the cut-throat attitude of those who make and break careers in the media. As we will see later, this expression also opens up a series of allegories emerging from the biblical narrative that inspired Arcand. The filmmaker also utilizes the prologue to ridicule art critics. After the show, a trio of reviewers rush to see Pascal Berger, proclaiming him to be the ‘best actor of his generation.’ Later in the film, the same critics

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use the same clichés to celebrate Daniel Coulombe as the best actor of his time. Arcand’s point here is evident. The media can elevate artists to the status of demigods as quickly as they can tear them down and forget all about them. However, the prologue serves another, more original purpose. By showing the suicide as a performance that elicits applause and praise, the filmmaker introduces from the outset the notion that death, as a perfomative gesture, can have an effect on the living. This hints at the effect of the passion play that forms the core of the film. In and of itself, the divine comedy of Jesus’s death embodies the power of the performance of death as a means of salvation. More specifically, it is the ‘on stage’ death of Daniel Coulombe, who is crushed under the weight of the cross on which he is ‘crucified’ during a riot triggered by the authorities’ attempt to censor the performance, that leads to the most concretely positive outcome. As the organs of the fatally injured actor are transplanted to other patients, his death is seen as the literal source of other people’s well being. The transplant scene near the end of the film, after the wounded Daniel has walked the streets of Montreal before collapsing in a metro station, has been interpreted by observers like Heinz Weinmann1 and Ian Lockerbie,2 as a metaphor for Quebec’s new willingness to open up to other ethnicities: Daniel’s organs are given to patients who explicitly are not francophone Quebeckers. Thus, the secular Eucharist that concludes the film does show death in a positive light. Not only is it a means to literally save the lives of others, it also affords cultural salvation. The moribund white, Catholic, FrenchCanadian society can be reborn as a multicultural heaven. However, as I have shown elsewhere, Quebec’s openness towards the ‘ethnic other’ in the late 1980s did not last very long.3 By the 1990s ‘old stock’ Quebeckers had started trying to reassert their traditional, ethnocentric values in response to perceived foreign threats to their culture.4 I will return to this topic in the next chapter.

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At yet another level, there is a sense that Daniel Coulombe dies not only to save the lives of others but also to save ‘art’ in general. Daniel is hired by Oratoire St-Joseph to update a passion play that has long ceased to attract audiences. But the young dramaturge does much more than simply rejuvenate an obsolete text. He peruses books about new historiographical research on Jesus, interviews theologians, and altogether reinvents the myth of Christ. In the process he writes, produces, and stars in a show that not only is about the ministry of Jesus, but, in fact, becomes the ministry. As Bart Testa argues in a complex reading of the film, the passion play itself embodies the passage of drama through death towards a new life: ‘In the scriptures, Jesus’s long cycle of miracles and preaching makes up much of the ministry. These are radically encapsulated in the first performance of Daniel’s passionplay. The Gospel climax of Jesus’s miracles is the raising of Lazarus, and the performance not only represents this miracle inside its text but, as a whole, Daniel’s passion-play also resurrects the dead Lazarus of a church pageant into compelling modern religious drama.’ As Testa masterfully explains, Arcand’s allegorical construction of Jesus’s passion is not merely to raise the question of ‘what if Jesus came back to the modern metropolis?’5 Rather, Arcand uses Jesus’s story to show the need to resurrect true art from the ashes of crass media consumerism. Not only does Daniel save art, he saves the artists whose lives have been shattered by image-saturated modernity. Like Jesus, Daniel recruits his disciples/actors among sinners who have suffered the slings and arrows of capitalist society. Mireille (Catherine Wilkening), a beautiful actress who ‘shows her ass to sell soap,’ is nothing short of a high-class prostitute. Martin (Rémy Girard) works for a company that dubs pornographic films. René (Robert Lepage) has determined not to sell his soul for money. But as a result, he cannot find regular work as an actor. As for Constance, she has given up entirely on acting and now serves the homeless in a soup kitchen. She returns to

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acting only because she believes in Daniel. Not surprisingly, after his death, she will join a religious order and reappear as a bona fide nun in Les Invasions barbares. The most obvious scene in which Daniel must save one of his disciples from the corruption of the media shows Mireille auditioning for a beer commercial in order to make some money. Here, Quintal, the vicious talent scout from the prologue, reappears and asks Mireille to take off her shirt so the lascivious producers of the commercial can see her body. Enraged by this treatment of Mireille in particular, and all actors in general, Daniel interrupts the audition, destroys some audiovisual equipment and violently hits Quintal. This equivalent to Jesus chasing the merchants from the temple is the most literal displacement of the spiritualist narrative of the Bible towards a commentary on the confrontation between true art and commercial media. Quintal’s demand for Pascal’s head in the prologue can also be read retrospectively as a biblical allegory, when his face appears on a poster in the metro station where Daniel collapses. Here, Pascal becomes John the Baptist, ‘his head served up on a platter,’ observes Testa, ‘the garish advertising poster, confirming Quintal has got what she wanted of him.’6 Similarly, the Catholic authorities’ censorship of the play corresponds to the Pharisees opposing Jesus’s ministry. The Church cancels the performance, which leads to a violent response on the part of the audience, with the deadly result that we know. In fact, Daniel does not literally die on stage. After the cross falls over and crushes him, he is brought to a francophone public hospital, where he regains consciousness and walks away with Mireille and Constance before collapsing in the metro station and eventually dying in an Anglo-Jewish hospital. The segment of the film in which the actor is brought to an overpopulated understaffed francophone hospital – a brief but striking precursor to the hospital scenes of Les Invasions barbares – leads Testa to argue that, in

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the final act of his film, Arcand veers away from a statement on the power of art and focuses instead on a political commentary on the horror of Canada’s disintegrating health system.7 Arcand’s depiction of the ‘suffering city,’ as Testa calls the Montreal of diseased patients in run-down hospitals, undoubtedly has political implications. But this ‘double twist’ does not negate the previous emphasis on the power of art. While the content of the final segment stresses social ills other – and evidently more serious – than the omnipresence of crassly commercial media, the film itself continues to operate as spectacle. The performance of the passion play may be more beautifully crafted than the later scenes,8 but the shots of the ambulance racing through the city’s streets, the austerely efficient Jewish hospital, the mundane metro station – all these remain aesthetically appealing. In fact, the final scene of the film asserts that the metro can be a site of great beauty, as two unemployed opera singers perform a stirring aria for passers-by. Moreover, the idea of art as a worthwhile venture does not disappear with the twist from aesthetics to politics. Following the organ transplant scene and Daniel’s humble funeral, René, Constance, and Martin attempt to create a theatre that will continue Daniel’s work. Although to make this project viable, the troupe must deal with a shady lawyer (Yves Jacques), there still seems to be a chance that Daniel’s sacrifice will foster further theatrical experiments in the same vein. It is not only the prospect of further experiments that made Daniel’s sacrifice worthwhile, but the success of the passion play itself. While the fawning reviewers appear ludicrous, the other spectators who flock to Mount Royal to attend the performance are seen to enjoy a unique experience that fulfils the fundamental purpose of theatre in particular and art in general: to educate audiences on the meaning of life while affording them some much needed entertainment. Jésus de Montréal is a striking example of art’s ability to say something

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important while providing a pleasurable aesthetic experience. Considered by some a superior film to Le Declin – Arcand’s ‘masterwork’ according to Margaret Majumbar9 – it garnered a stunning twelve Genies (Canadian film awards), four more than Arcand’s previous hit. It also won the Jury’s Price at the Cannes Film Festival, something of a consolation price for the Palme d’Or runner-up.10 And like Le Declin, it was a finalist for the best foreign-language film Oscar. Yet I personally prefer Le Déclin over Jésus. There is something to be said for the aesthetic and narrative economy of the 1986 film. That a casual chat among a small group of people gathered around a fish pie can evoke so much with such minimal means is an achievement. Conversely, Jésus’s emphasis on spectacle and its overly allegorical narrative work against it at times, which might be why the film did not attract as much praise as Déclin in most international markets. The 1989 production was less discussed by American reviewers than its predecessor, and the French, who loved the ‘cinéma de parole’ deployed in Déclin, were less impressed with Jésus.11 This being said, Jésus de Montréal remains a remarkable achievement, and its very respectable success demonstrated that Denys Arcand was most certainly not a one-hit wonder. With the back-to-back successes of Déclin de l’empire américain and Jésus de Montréal, Arcand had become by 1990 the best-known Quebec filmmaker in the world. But as his celebrity reached unprecedented heights, he was afflicted by a personal tragedy. His mother died shortly after the release of Jésus. In a strange twist of fate, his father had died shortly after the release of Le Déclin.12 After the death of his parents Arcand’s morbid penchant became a veritable obsession. ‘I was always obsessed by death,’ admits the filmmaker. ‘If I were analyzed, my analyst would tell you.’13 While the death of Daniel Coulombe in Jésus had a life affirming quality, Arcand now found himself unable to shake off the gloom and dejection that afflicted him after his mother died. Throughout the 1990s he struggled to write a screenplay on the death of his par-

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ents but was incapable of dealing with the issue in a way that was not utterly demoralizing. Rémy Girard recalls that as early as 1991 Arcand was already so frustrated with his inability to write his screenplay on death that he would tear his failed scripts to pieces.14 But while it would take him another decade to come up with a satisfactory scenario, the films he made in the 1990s still dealt with his morbid obsession. Arcand’s first feature after Jésus de Montréal was Love and Human Remains (1993), an adaptation of Brad Fraser’s hit play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989).15 Because of the strong emphasis on sex and death in Love and Human Remains, it is worth looking at this film at some length here. In March 1991 Arcand attended a play starring his friend Yves Jacques. Jacques was playing the role of David in a French version of Fraser’s drama about love and serial killings in Edmonton. The dark sexuality of the play immediately appealed to the cineaste. Furthermore, since he had recently directed a stage play entitled Les lettres de la religieuse portugaise in 1990, his frame of mind was very much oriented towards the theatre. Incapable of writing the screenplay he wanted and impressed with the performance of Fraser’s drama, he elected to try his hand at adapting this morbidly sexy stage thriller. On the very night he saw Unidentified Human Remains, he asked his producer Roger Frappier to secure the rights for a film version.16 At the time, everyone was waiting for Arcand’s next hit, and Fraser was being hailed as ‘the country’s hottest playwright.’17 So a project by an eminently bankable filmmaker and a high profile playwright emerged as a potentially ideal collaboration. But Love and Human Remains did not meet with the resounding acclaim that Déclin de l’empire américain and Jésus de Montréal had received, far from it. While some critics praised the film,18 most saw serious weaknesses in the serial-killer background story, which ‘proves overly melodramatic and angst-ridden.’19 But it is not surprising that angst and melodrama would dominate a film made by a man who was obsessed with

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death. Melodrama and angst would also find their way into Les Invasions barbares, and it could be argued that it took the failure of Love and Human Remains for Arcand to eventually develop a formula that would avoid the pitfalls of his flawed thriller. Another aspect of Love and Human Remains that would resurface in the later film is Arcand’s genuine interest in the drama of dejected and lonely young men and women living in a world of drugs, one-night stands, and brutal murders. The character of Nathalie from Les Invasions, in her drug addiction and emotional barrenness, is a direct heir to the characters of Love and Human Remains. As such, Love and Human Remains serves as a bridge between Le Déclin and Les Invasions, sketching the passage from one generation to the next. For Odile Tremblay of Le Devoir, ‘Love and Human Remains is like Déclin de l’empire américain ten years later, when things have not improved and there is nothing left at the end other than death.’20 As I have argued elsewhere, while there are plenty of references to physical deaths in the screen and stage versions, what Fraser’s drama and screenplay deal with primarily is the state of emotional death of young adults, resulting from their lack of positive commitment to others.21 This condition of living death, which both versions examine, is introduced first through the main character, David (Thomas Gibson), a thirty-something, frustrated actor who makes a living as a waiter. In both the film and the play, David has tried to make it in Toronto but has returned home jaded and cynical. In fact, the ‘home’ to which David has returned is depicted in the film as an anonymous, disengaged city that could be Montreal, Ottawa, or Edmonton. The sense of placelessness created by the film parallels David’s uprooted cynicism. The resentment caused by his failure as an actor finds an outlet in his hedonistic behaviour, denigration of love, and sarcastic wit. It will take the actual death of his friend Bernie (Cameron Bancroft) before he can acknowledge the importance of emotional commitment. Bernie, David’s childhood buddy, is also dissatisfied with his exist-

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ence. But Bernie’s disaffection, rather than expressing itself through relatively harmless sexual escapades, takes the form of perversions ranging from homophobia and misogyny to actual murder. As is revealed at the end of the play and the film, it is Bernie who has been raping and killing women over the last several weeks. When David confronts him about his crimes, Bernie throws the blame right back at him: DAVID: I thought I knew you. BERNIE: You do David. You’re just like me. DAVID: No. BERNIE: Yes [...] They weren’t anyone that mattered. They were secretaries, waitresses, nurses – hairdressers for Christ’s sake [...] They weren’t important. DAVID: Yes they were [...] To their families. Themselves. To me. BERNIE: You? Get real, David. No one’s ever mattered to you in your life [...] You don’t give a shit about people. They drop in and out of your life all the time. Who cares how they feel? There’s only been one person you ever really cared about. Me [...] Stay with me David. We’ll go away somewhere where they don’t know me. I won’t do it again [...] It’s your fault! It’s because you left the first time! I could control it when you were around [...] They’ll hurt me, David. They’ll put me in jail – they’ll [...] I thought you loved me. DAVID: I do.22

This passage emphasizes the fine line between David’s refusal to care for anybody – which is not unlike Pierre’s cynical attitude in Le Déclin – and Bernie’s brutal disregard for human life, especially the life of women. The metaphorical death of the feminine in Le Déclin is literalized in Love and Human Remains. David and Bernie are alter egos, the former the cool detached gay gallant and the latter the murderous misogynist unable to accept his latent homosexual desires for David. It is only after Bernie has killed himself that David recognizes this parallel and can become emotionally involved.

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The film closes on David saying ‘I love you’ to his friends Candy (Ruth Marshall) and Kane (Matthew Fergusson). In the play, the last words, which express the growing emotional commitment between David, Candy, and Kane, are pronounced by Benita (Mia Kirshner), David’s psychic friend, who earns a living as a dominatrix and tells horror stories to her clients. Though Benita is perhaps the most contented character in the cast, the nature of her employment and especially her accounts of gruesome urban myths bear witness to the macabre backdrop of the story. Her constant references to boyfriends with heads chopped off or babysitters harassed by psycho-killers mirror the tragic events of the play. While the final ‘I love you’ of Love and Human Remains implies the promise of a rejuvenated society, the gruesome tone and violent design of the drama are not fully replaced by hopefulness through the last line of dialogue. On the contrary, one suspects that this is but a temporary wave of optimism that will soon be replaced by a pool of stagnating selfloathing. Interestingly, in the first published version of the play, in the magazine Theatrum (September/October 1989), and the first book publication of the text in 1990, both Benita and David said ‘I love you’ at the end. But in the 1996 reprint, which also includes Fraser’s screenplay for Love and Human Remains,23 David no longer says ‘I love you,’ perhaps implying that the author came to recognize that the living cadaver of David was not quite fully resuscitated in the end. In his second feature film of the 1990s, the little-known Joyeux Calvaire (1996), Arcand remained fixated on death, but this time he replaced the disengaging placelessness of Love and Human Remains with an explicitly identified location: Montreal, a crumbling metropolis whose dilapidated cityscape becomes one of the central characters of the drama. Based on a screenplay by Claire Richard, life partner of reclusive novelist Réjean Ducharme, Joyeux Calvaire follows Marcel (Gaston Lepage) and Joseph (Benoît Brière), two itinerant men who wander around the city

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5.1. Benita the dominatrix. Courtesy of Max Films. © Max Films

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in search of a friend, Stanley (Lorne Brass), whose suicidal tendencies worry them. Claire Richard had spent years volunteering with Montreal’s vagrant population. Her personal experiences with the homeless inspired a loosely structured script that lacked any linear, action-oriented narrative. But this quality actually appealed to Arcand, who at that point wanted only to walk in the streets of the city with a camera and record the comings and goings of those people’s disconnected lives.24 As the film unfolds and the Vladimir-and-Estragon-type duo walks through a decrepit downtown, old-timer Marcel recounts to newcomer Joseph the untold history of the homeless subculture. Tales of madness, disease, violence, addiction, and death comprise this narrative, which oscillates between tragedy and comedy. Lawyers turned hobo, unseemly old women, religious fanatics, drunks, bag ladies, prostitutes – these are the human remains who inhabit the dirty back alleys, inhospitable vacant lots, seedy subway stations, and abandoned buildings of Montreal. Of the ‘Sex and Death’ dyad that structures most of Arcand’s cinema, only the latter operates in this fictional documentary on the underclass that can’t escape the collapse of the empire by retreating to the peaceful countryside. Joyeux Calvaire, which could be translated roughly as ‘blissful misery,’ attests to the futile resilience of human beings who desperately cling to life when death is the only option. Arcand’s next feature is an intriguing look at the same issue, but from the opposing perspective. In Stardom (2000), his second film in English after Love and Human Remains, the cineaste examines the extent to which a society will go to repress its petrifying fear of decay, violence, and death by hiding behind a trivial image of beauty. Stardom tells the story of Tina (Jessica Paré), a small-town girl whose main passion is hockey, until she is discovered and turned into a top fashion model. His first original screenplay since Jésus de Montréal, the script that was first known as ‘Beautiful’25 and then as ‘15 Moments,’ in

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reference to Andy Warhol’s idea of everybody’s fifteen minutes of fame,26 took Arcand several years to write. As he started enjoying some personal fame in the late 1980s, he became increasingly interested in the celebrity industry, epitomized by the world of haute couture. But the various screenplays he wrote on the subject in the early 1990s did not meet with the approval of his producer, Roger Frappier.27 After completing Love and Human Remains, Arcand decided to leave Frappier’s Max Films and signed a contract with Toronto’s Robert Lantos for the production of the fashion film. The agreement with Lantos stipulated that Denise Robert, who had her own production company in Montréal, Cinémaginaire, would act as producer.28 Another half-decade passed before the script of ‘Beautiful’ was transformed into ‘Stardom’ and was ready for production. In the meantime, Denise Robert produced Joyeux Calvaire for Arcand and in the process became his spouse. The final product was a disappointment.29 While his acerbic criticism of the media in Jésus de Montréal seemed original in 1989, by 2000 Arcand’s commentary on the haughty shallowness of celebrity culture, the insipid egocentricity of high fashion, the hollowness of the hyperactive MTV aesthetics that dominates contemporary television, and the ruthlessness of the entertainment business seemed clichéd.30 However, Stardom does make some valid points about the morbidity and violence that lie just beneath the thin veneer of beauty. Interspersed throughout the film, we hear news of terrorist attacks and mass murders. Tina herself becomes violent, breaking the jaw of an anti-fur activist who threw paint at her. But she is also the victim of violence, as her failed-businessman boyfriend (Dan Ackroyd) takes his frustration out on her, and her ambassador husband (Frank Langella) regularly slaps her around. Society, however, does not allow the horrors of the world to threaten its desperate need for superficially reassuring beauty. Thus, frivolity must always eclipse terror. This explains the ending of the film. Back to an ordinary life after her fifteen minutes, Tina now lives in a comfortable

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but average home with her physician husband. The final scene shows a perfectly snowy evening, with a perfectly pregnant Tina giving the camera a perfectly sweet smile. Unlike the closing shots of Le Déclin, which display Rémy’s house in a wintry, natural landscape, the setting here stresses artificiality. The last shots of Stardom expose the synthetic surface that veils the terror of Tina’s ravaged soul and decaying body, as the blissfulness of the domestic scene is purposefully unconvincing. In this respect, Robert Lepage in the role of trendy photographer/ videographer Bruce Taylor, who is making an artsy documentary about Tina, speaks perhaps the most relevant lines of the whole film. When asked if his documentary is about ‘the superficiality of our time,’ Taylor responds: ‘You’ve got to remember that superficiality never killed anybody ... you may think that Calvin Klein is shallow, but the guy never bombed Cambodia.’ This is ‘Arcandian’ irony at its best, for the line is at once absolutely true and idiotically naive. That Andy Warhol is less reprehensible than Polpot – to paraphrase another part of Taylor’s response – is self-evident. But superficiality is also implicated in the violence that it serves to shield. It is the superficiality of Klein and all those who, like him, promote a culture of trendy impermanence that blinds the masses to the terrifying realities that surround them. It is that distracting superficiality that gives free reign to those responsible for unspeakable acts of terror and violence, from George W. Bush to Muslim extremists. With the exception of a few sharply insightful passages like this one, however, Arcand limited himself to making a superficially entertaining film on the superficiality of entertainment. Can anyone expose a problem by merely replicating it? Judging by Stardom, the answer seems to be ‘no.’ But with his next film, the cineaste succeeded in merging the entertainment value of Stardom and the apocalyptic darkness of Joyeux Calvaire to make a film about sex and death that could be at once critical of contemporary society, hilariously amusing, and deeply moving.

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By 2001, after a decade of directing other people’s scripts and working in the other language, Arcand was eager to resume work on a French-language screenplay of his own.31 But he was still struggling with the difficulty of examining death in a way that would be neither utterly gloomy nor wholly superficial. He eventually came up with a clever idea: What if he depicted the dying days of a character who has an undying love for life, a bon vivant who would still be telling jokes on his deathbed? What if he showed the death of his liveliest character, Rémy.32 How would Rémy deal with death, and how would his friends, now in their fifties, react to his passing? Armed with these initial questions, the cineaste embarked on writing a tragicomedy around his beloved characters from Le Déclin.33 In January 2002 Arcand contacted Rémy Girard, who was playing Falstaff in a French version of The Merry Wives of Windsor at Montreal’s highly respected repertory theatre Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. He told Girard: ‘I have a gift for you.’ The gift was his new screenplay. When he heard that his memorable character would be revived (only to be put to death), Girard immediately agreed to take part in the project.34 Dominique Michel also said ‘yes’ as soon as Arcand showed her the script for Les Invasions barbares. She was amazed by the intelligence of the screenplay, which she found as amusing as Le Déclin but darker in tone. While she felt intense pressure at the prospect of revisiting a character that had worked so well for her fifteen years earlier, she could not resist the temptation to become Professor Saint-Arnaud again.35 Not only did Michel recreate her role for the film, she also found the lead actor to play Sébastien opposite Girard’s Rémy: Stéphane Rousseau. Early in Le Déclin, Louise tells Rémy over the phone: ‘Sébastien broke the window in the back door. I’ve covered it, but should I call in a repairman? And my car is dead. It must be the starter. Sylvaine had a fit ’cause I couldn’t drive her to ballet.’ This is about as much as we hear in the first film about Rémy and Louise’s children, Sébastien and Sylvaine.

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We never see the children; we merely hear them in the background during a flashback where Rémy and Louise are having breakfast. In Les Invasions the children, now adults, become a central part of the narrative, especially Sébastien, who, since his parents’ divorce fifteen years ago, has had a difficult relationship with his father. Having read the screenplay, Dominique Michel thought that Stéphane Rousseau would be excellent in the role of Sébastien. Rousseau was a well-known standup comedian with whom she had worked, but he had little experience as an actor. Michel’s own story was similar. Famous as a comedian since the 1960s, she had worked in films since the early 1970s, but always in light comedies such as Tiens-toi bien après les oreilles à papa (1971, Jean Bissonnette). Arcand had given her a small part in Le Crime d’Ovide Plouffe, but not until her role as Professor Saint-Arnaud did she shine as a serious actress. If Arcand had managed to transform one stand-up comic, Michel thought, perhaps he could do the same with another. Arcand agreed to audition Rousseau only out of friendship for Michel. He was deeply impressed by Rousseau’s performance.36 Around Girard, Michel, Rousseau, and the other members of the original cast – Yves Jacques, Pierre Curzi, Dorothée Berryman, and Louise Portal – Arcand assembled a large group of famous faces, ranging from darkly handsome Roy Dupuis, in the role of a noir cop, to former pop star Mitsou Gélinas as Pierre’s new wife, and veteran filmmaker Micheline Lanctôt as an overworked nurse.37 The most noteworthy addition to the original cast was probably Marie-Josée Croze as Nathalie, Diane’s daughter, who appears briefly in Le Déclin as a madly jealous seven-year-old.38 Now a heroin addict, she is hired by Sébastien to provide drugs to a suffering Rémy to assuage his pain. Croze’s character is secondary, but the actress’s mysterious and incredibly sensual presence commands the screen to such an extent that she overshadows everyone else. Her aura of passionate restraint makes each line she speaks evoke five layers of subtext. She won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.39

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In the fall of 2002 the large ensemble of actors spent over a month in an abandoned hospital in Montreal – the Lachine General Hospital – transformed for the purpose of the film into an outdated, understaffed, and overpopulated sickbay.40 Arcand had spent many long days in hospitals during his parents’ illness,41 and this decaying building was the perfect incarnation of what he thought of Quebec’s crumbling health system. Given the relatively small budget of approximately $6 million,42 which producer Denise Robert had had to fight long and hard to secure because of Stardom’s tepid results at the box office two years before, the abandoned hospital also had to do double duty as other decrepit institutions. For instance, a small office in the hospital temporarily becomes a police station43 where Sébastien naively asks a detective, Gilles Levac (Roy Dupuis),44 how to find heroin before he learns of Nathalie’s connections with the underworld. As was the case for Le Déclin, parts of Les Invasions were shot in the beautiful landscape of Lac Memphrémagog. As was also the case in 1985, the 2002 shoot was, by all accounts, a remarkably pleasant affair. As the production wrapped up on 14 November, the melancholia that engulfs the end of the film following Rémy’s death also overwhelmed the cast and crew. It was as difficult for assistant director Jacques W. Benoit45 to leave Arcand and his gang as it is for Dominique, Louise, Claude, Pierre, and Sébastien to leave Rémy. And as was the case with the first film, the pleasure that everyone felt working together on the sequel transcended the limits of the screen and touched audiences around the world. A twenty-two-minute standing ovation at Cannes46 and two of its most prestigious awards, Best Actress and Best Screenplay; raving reviews at home47 and abroad;48 over $35 million at the box office world wide – a record for a Quebec film;49 a Genie for best Canadian film of 2003; a César for best French film (Les Invasions is a Canada-France co-production); and ultimately an Oscar for best foreign-language film

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5.2. Nathalie provides Rémy with heroine to assuage his pain. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

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– Arcand’s obsession with death became perhaps the greatest success of Quebec cinema. Not that Les Invasions is considered the greatest artistic accomplishment in French-Canadian film history. Generally, Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971), Francis Mankiewicz’s Les bons débarras (1980), Michel Brault’s Les Ordres (1974), and, indeed, Le Déclin de l’empire américain rank higher on lists of ‘Best Quebec films ever made’ than Les Invasions barbares.50 Nor is it the most popular Quebec film amongst the Québécois themselves; as of 2008 Éric Canuel’s Bon Cop Bad Cop (2006) holds that distinction.51 However, considering its overall critical and commercial achievements, its cultural resonance in Quebec and Canada, as well as its unprecedented succès d’estime in international film circuits, Arcand’s look at death through the eyes of a ‘bon vivant who is about to have the “vivant” yanked out from under him,’52 represents the culmination of Quebec cinema’s evolution over the last fifty years and stands as undeniable evidence of its maturity.

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6

‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts As Marcel Jean has noted, Arcand’s portrait of the bon vivant’s demise attests to the cineaste’s long-standing interest in the theatre.1 Like Le Déclin, it follows the three-act structure of conventional drama. There are more characters and locations in Les Invasions than in Le Déclin, and the strict unity of time of the 1986 original is not respected in the 2003 sequel. However, the latter film’s composition remains clearly demarcated by a succession of self-contained acts, and each act consists of a succession of discrete scenes often separated from one another by fadeins and fade-outs. Bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue, Les Invasions comprises Act I, set in a crowded hospital room; Act II, in a private room created specifically at Sébastien’s request; and Act III, at Pierre’s country house by Lac Memphrémagog. Although it is something of a cliché, it is still worth mentioning the ironic trajectory of the drama, from the crowded room above, to the private room on the floor below, and finally to the ground-level space of the country house. The ‘descent’ rather than the expected ‘ascension’ of the dying professor harks back to Rémy’s numerous references to hell in both films. As an inveterate lecher, he often points out that the realm in which he prefers to operate is a hot, sexy hell rather than a pleasantly boring heaven. Speaking to Sister Lazure, he is delighted to say that promiscuous Dominique and Diane are very likely to burn in hell with him, ‘whereas you’ll play the

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harp on a cloud for eternity between John-Paul II, a surly Pole, and Mother Theresa, a slimy Albanian.’ Also as in its predecessor, the passage form one act to the next in Les Invasions traces a clear movement in the characters’ evolution, oscillating ‘between melodrama and comedy’ to quote Pierre Véronneau.2 But while in Déclin each successive act marks a step away from light-hearted comedy towards increasingly intense personal conflict, Les Invasions moves in a different direction, from quarrel and chaos through pathos to reconciliation and acceptance. As Rémy and his son gradually become closer to one another, the film provides us with hints that the gap between the two generations is narrowing. As the narrative progresses, Sébastien spends less and less time speaking English on his cellphone and more time communicating with the people around him until, near the end, Nathalie literally throws the phone in the fire, thus marking the final step towards human contact rather than electronic communication. Philip Kemp of Sight and Sound has also observed that the film’s style parallels its dramatic structure: ‘the cold blues and greys that predominate in the early hospital sequences imperceptibly give way to warmer, gentler tones until we arrive at the idyllic lakeside.’3 The prologue sets the stage. ‘London 2:30 pm,’ a busy traders office filled with computers and men looking at incomprehensible graphs and tables on screens. A phone rings. Sébastien picks up and speaks the first words of the film: ‘Bonjour maman.’ It is worth stressing the difference between this first image, and the opening shot of Le Déclin. The close-up on the exotic features of a Vietnamese student sitting in a French Canadian university classroom evokes, as we have already seen, the growing presence of ‘others’ in the Quebec landscape as well as the outdated orientalist prejudices of Rémy and Pierre. The image of Sébastien working in the austere but efficient environment of ‘MacDougallDeutsch’ does not connote the idea of a Quebec that must adapt to a changing world. Rather it implies a Quebec that is no longer there at all.

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However, that within this utterly anglophone milieu the son would still address his mother in his mother tongue puts an intriguing spin on the previous reading. Sébastien still has an attachment to French Canada. Furthermore, as we quickly learn, his partner Gaëlle is also francophone. The world of emotions therefore is still closely connected to French. But as a businessman, Sébastien is entirely immersed in the language of Sir Richard Branson, Sir Philip Green, the Ruben Brothers ... and Arnold Toynbee. The conversation between Sébastien and Louise also introduces the central conflict of the drama. ‘Your dad’s prognosis isn’t good. You have to come,’ implores the mother. ‘We saw each other for 15 minutes last summer. We had nothing to say,’ retorts the son abruptly. He eventually acquiesces to his mother’s request. The film, in its longer version, then cuts to the hospital room that Rémy shares with three other men. An embittered ex-mistress screams at the cancerous womanizer, listing all the women with whom he cheated on her. Typically, Rémy has forgotten some of them. The atmosphere is abrasive, chaotic, and demoralizing. As in Love and Human Remains and Joyeux Calvaire, social collapse mirrors physical decay. Rémy is now a pathetic lecher, estranged from his son and patently incapable of having a lasting romantic relationship with a woman. Here and in another scene that appears only in the longer version, former lovers also allude to Rémy’s inability to satisfy them sexually. ‘I’ve got news for you, darling,’ announces the enraged mistress of the prologue, ‘you’re not equipped to pleasure anyone.’ For one whose entire adult life has revolved around bragging about his sexual prowess and projecting the persona of a formidable lover, this statement must come as a devastating blow. Yet there is something amusing about the whole scene, as the resentful mistress pushes around Monsieur Duhamel (Denis Bouchard), another patient who goes about his business in the room.4 This scene is quite typical of the whole film, as gloomy moments are often energized by flashes of comedy. Similarly, hilarious scenes can suddenly shift

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moods and throw the audience off. This is especially common in moments when Rémy is enjoying a good laugh with his friends and suddenly starts coughing uncontrollably as the mortal disease overpowers the bon vivant’s joie de vivre. Thus, by the end of the prologue, Arcand has already introduced his narrative strategy and the elements with which he will play for the rest of the film: generational conflict; disease; the cultural specificity of capital; problems with the healthcare system; incommunicability among characters; but also humour, affection, and filial loyalty. Act I begins immediately after the opening credits, with Sister Lazure mistakenly addressing Rémy as Monsieur Desmarais. Rémy is angered by the mistake and the sister apologizes, claiming that it is a computer error. The fact that the mix-up is linked to a computer failure attests to the collapse of an entire infrastructure increasingly controlled, albeit inefficiently, by machines. Rémy appears as an embittered patient from the start, but Louise is decidedly more upbeat. As Sister Lazure expresses sympathy for this woman whose husband is hospitalized, Louise responds with a smile: ‘I threw him out 15 years ago. So whether he’s here or humping co-eds in his condo ... ’ Louise’s presence at Rémy’s bedside and her affectionately dismissive comment are an early sign of the trajectory that the film will follow. From the outset, the exwife’s continued kindness towards the man she kicked out years before bears witness to the potential for forgiveness and acceptance that other characters will later display. In this sense, my previous hypothesis that Le Déclin might ultimately side with the naive housewife is proved by this first exchange between the ex-spouses. Throughout Les Invasions, Louise is doing the right thing from a humanist perspective. In a later scene, where it is revealed that another of Rémy’s mistresses came to visit him at the hospital, Louise’s reaction is not one of anger or depression, but rather of amused incredulity at her ex-husband’s addiction to women: ‘you didn’t sleep with Marlène

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Dupire? She’s a certified nut, everyone knows,’ she says, laughing. She has accepted Rémy for who he is, and with a strong dose of irony and humour offers him friendship and support at a time when he seems to have nothing else left. While not one of the central characters of the film, Louise certainly performs the role of moral centre from beginning to end. She does the only moral thing she can do under the circumstances, namely, to genially tolerate Rémy’s pathetic need to ‘hump’ young women. Yet Rémy is unwilling to play along along, arguing that he no longer ‘humps’ students. Louise names one, Raphaëlle Metellus (Janique Kearns), as a student with whom Rémy did have an affair. He dismisses that example, however, for Raphaëlle was not specifically one of his students; she took classes with Dominique and Pierre.5 The student’s name is significant, for we encounter her later in a flashback in which Rémy announces to his utterly indifferent students that he must give up teaching for health reasons. Raphaëlle is the teaching assistant hired to take over his class. The flashback, halfway through the film, is noteworthy for many reasons. First, it shows the apathy of students who could not care less for their professor and the subject he teaches. Furthermore, it shows the institution’s absolute lack of sympathy towards its employees. The flashback comes to illustrate Rémy’s commentary to his son about the triviality of his position as a professor: ‘I was replaced by a TA within 48 hours. The dean neglected to say goodbye.’ Finally the brief sequence shows the absence of connection between Rémy and his ‘fling,’ Raphaëlle. As he introduces her to the students, there is no hint of tenderness or complicity between the professor and the student he ‘humped.’ Indeed, it is quite easy to forget Louise’s prior reference to the young woman when, an hour later in the film, Raphaëlle is introduced. A few students spotted in this flashback, unexpectedly reappear in the present tense of the narrative, as a small delegation arrives at the

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6.1. Louise offers her ex-husband friendship, support, and a joint in his time of need. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

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hospital to convey their good wishes to their ailing professor. Rémy is visibly touched by this surprising show of respect from these young people. Typically Arcand complicates this ‘feel good’ moment by including a brief scene seconds later in which Sébastien pays the students for having come to visit his father. The endearing scene that has just transpired is now turned into a bit of dark cynicism; not only are students indifferent, they are also greedy and hypocritical, readily accepting money in exchange for feigned kindness. But Arcand twists the scene again by showing one of the students, a young woman (RoseMaïté Erkoreka), actually refusing Sébastien’s money (the two others gladly take her share). The female student’s refusal to take money implies at least two things. First, seeing her professor in a hospital bed actually moved her. In fact, her abrupt rejection of Sébastien’s $20 bill shows that she even feels disgusted with herself for having agreed to play this charade in the first place. Second, it is one of the very rare instances in the film where we get a sense that Sébastien’s money cannot buy everything. Through most of the film, money appears as an effective way – the only way in fact – for Sébastien to buy his father some comfort during the last few days of his life. But the student’s refusal of payment marks the limit of what money can do. Her dismissal of the ‘deal’ puts money ‘in its place.’ Dollar bills are things that are exchanged for other things. Her rejection of this ‘thing,’ as we will see, sets her apart from the other barbarians, who can conceive of themselves and others only as objects in a material world. The material world, of course, is associated primarily with Sébastien. The first time Louise mentions to Rémy that Sébastien will come from England to visit him, the resentful man criticizes his son for being interested only in video games and having never read a book. ‘He may not read, but he earns more in a month than you in a year,’ retorts Louise. Immediately after this line, Rémy is overwhelmed with pain and the image fades to black as the sound of Sébastien’s plane arriving in Mon-

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treal fades in, followed by accompanying images. The link Arcand draws between Sébastien’s financial success and Rémy’s painful disease brings to the fore one of the main social commentaries of the film. Rémy’s hedonistic lifestyle, the comfort that his generation has enjoyed out of fortunate circumstances rather than gainful work, cannot sustain itself in a world where money has crushed (almost) all other values. One of the most often quoted lines from the film6 is Rémy’s distinction between himself and his progeny: ‘My son is an ambitious puritanical capitalist. Whereas I was always a sensual socialist.’ But while the sensual pleasures of good books, good wine and good lays might have once brought joy to the bon vivant, it is now cold, puritanical cash that provides him with his few remaining gratifications. As soon as he arrives in Montreal with Gaëlle, Sébastien takes out his wallet and uses his formidable capitalist power to alleviate his father’s suffering. His first significant act of philanthropy towards Rémy is paying for a PET scan at an American hospital in nearby Burlington. Following a suggestion from his friend Maxime (Dominic Darceuil), a medical doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Sébastien asks a nurse (Markita Boies) about the procedure for getting this test. She answers that there is a sixto-twelve month waiting list. She also informs him that it can be done quickly in Burlington, but at an exorbitant cost. ‘Money’s no problem,’ answers the young man. The social significance of this statement is explicit: while the Canadian universal health care system provides mediocre services equally to everyone, the private American system can offer the best services in the world to those who happen to have money. Sébastien also arranges to get his father a room at Johns Hopkins. But Rémy refuses. ‘I won’t go into exile. No goddamn way ... I’m not going to the States to be murdered by rabid Mohammedans ... I voted for Medicare; I’ll accept the consequences.’ As the argument escalates, Rémy spews out: ‘You may be a millionaire, but you know nothing.’ ‘I know I won’t end up like you!’ responds Sébastien before barging out of

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the room. Arcand clearly intends us to read the father-son conflict, at least in part, as an allegory for the changing reality of Quebec. The Welfare State can no longer assure the welfare of its citizens. The alternative is to give in to the American empire. But as is always the case with Arcand, seemingly straightforward meanings are undercut by multilayered and sometimes paradoxical counterarguments.7 In the same passage, he also suggests through Rémy that the emerging threat of Muslim fundamentalism is a far more immediate menace for Americans than for Canadians. Approximately thirty minutes into the film (in its longer version) the well-known images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center are seen on television. A familiar face appears to explain the events. It is Alain, the TA from Le Déclin who now works at the National Research Centre. ‘What is significant, as my old profs said,’ explains Alain with an implicit reference to Rémy and Pierre, ‘is they struck at the heart of the Empire ... In that sense, people may look back on 9/11, and I stress may, as the beginning of the great barbarian invasions.’ As in Le Déclin, a commentary from a ‘specialist’ gives the film its title. In the 1986 film, the marginality of Canada was perceived as a potential advantage in the eventuality of cataclysmic war. ‘If Plattsburgh were hit [by nuclear bombs], we’d probably see the fireball,’ Dominique speculated, reflecting the typical Canadian position of ineffectual observation. ‘For me, that’s Canadians: sitting on the terrace, watching the United States blow up,’ Arcand said shortly after the release of Le Déclin.8 By 2003 Rémy still remains convinced that the barbarians may be at the doors of the empire, but that he is protected in his overcrowded room, lost in the middle of nowhere, in ‘some backward province’ – ‘une province de Ti-counes’ – as Sébastien contemptuously refers to Quebec.9 A scene approaching the halfway point of the film intimates that Rémy’s impression that he is somewhat protected from the Muslim barbarians might be only wishful thinking. As Sébastien accompanies

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Nathalie to her drug dealer, he encounters detective Levac. In a charismatically underplayed performance, rather typical for him, Roy Dupuis incarnates Levac as a cynical, world-weary cop with a resilient core of morality and passion. He explains to Sébastien, with casual intensity, that the drug trade is controlled by Middle-Eastern gangs: ‘we work 2, 3 years, bust an Iranian gang. Everyone’s happy. And Iraqis take their place. Or the Lebanese. Turks. Italians. There’s too much demand. It’s an invasion.’ Iranians, Iraqis, and Lebanese now insidiously roam the streets of Montreal threatening Quebec society. But the barbarians are not only, or even primarily, the ‘Mohammedans’ from whom Rémy wants to remain sheltered. Levac’s reference to Italians reduces the degree of ethnic otherness of the barbarians, especially when one remembers that Claude now lives in Italy. Furthermore, all the characters who are seen coming and going from the heroin dealer’s house are Caucasians; one is even identified as ‘Michel Richer,’ a typical FrenchCanadian name. The barbarians, therefore, are also the Québécois themselves. A brief passage near the end of the film makes this point perfectly clear. In his delirium the dying professor says, ‘The middle ages, the manuscripts ... the barbarians, everywhere, tomorrow. Their Prince approaches.’ As Rémy speaks the last three words of this line, Sébastien appears on screen and the others turn towards him; he is the leader of the barbarians that we must prepare ourselves to meet. As Jean-François Plamondon has argued, for Arcand the barbarians are those who overthrow civilization. But civilization is not merely to be understood as the west in opposition to the Middle East. Rather, civilization is defined as the regime of the literary. The barbarians are those who shatter literature, wherever they might be from: Iran, England, America, or Montreal. The barbarians use a different kind of language; a language that does not speak from the reflective distance afforded by literature, but rather functions as a practical expression of materiality. An obvious

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example is when Sébastien tries to explain his job to his father. His arcane, high-finance jargon is visibly lost on the history professor. Rémy cannot possibly understand his son’s words, for the two operate on different planes. Barbarians are characterized not by a state of being in knowledge, but rather by a state of having things; not exchanging ideas, but trading objects. As Plamondon stresses, the barbarians have replaced the auxiliary verb ‘to be’ with the auxiliary verb ‘to have.’ Replacing books and art with merchandise typifies barbarism.10 Paraphrasing Constantin Cavafy’s famous poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1904), one might say that the invaders are dazzled by ‘rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds’ and are ‘bored by rhetoric and public speech.’11 This allusion to Cavafy’s poem, which some critics have cited in reference to Arcand’s film,12 brings to mind the last line of the verse: these barbarians are ‘a kind of solution.’ Sébastien might epitomize everything Rémy hates, but he remains the only person who has the power to provide a solution to his father’s state of agony. Sébastien’s power is barbaric not only because of the crass capitalism he incarnates. As Roberta Imboden remarks, the actions he performs to help his father often break the rules of society.13 An early scene, which appears only in the longer version of the film, shows Sébastien annoyed with Monsieur Duhamel’s loud television. He does not hesitate to walk out of the room and cut off the cable wire to give his father some peace and quiet. This is a minor transgression of the law, of course, but it speaks volumes about the young man’s brazen disregard for the rules that more ‘civilized’ people unquestioningly respect. He bribes students, union reps, and hospital administrators, casually purchases heroin, and makes arrangements for his father’s assisted suicide. All of these actions could compose an image of Sébastien as, at best, a small-time crook and, at worst, a murderer. But the Prince of the barbarians is deserving of our admiration, for he breaks petty social laws to achieve a greater good: providing his father with comfort and friendship.

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After one of the most haunting scenes in the film, in which the anguished faces of Rémy and his roommates, unable to sleep at night, are shown in succession with eerily monotonic music on the soundtrack, we find Sébastien and Gaëlle at Louise’s house. Frustrated with his father’s refusal to go to Johns Hopkins, Sébastien is ready to give up and fly back to England. This is when his mother reminds him of all that his father has done for him. ‘When you had meningitis at age 3,’ she tells her son, ‘he rocked you in his arms for 48 hours non-stop, without sleep, to keep death at bay. You can’t remember that.’ Recognizing that he owes his father, he asks his mother what he should do. ‘Find his friends,’ she responds, ‘find him a comfortable room.’ Again Louise speaks with the voice of righteousness. What Rémy needs is not to be in the best hospital in the world. He needs only comfort and friendship. While in 1980 Arcand condemned the Québécois’s penchant for comfort and indifference and perceived the Machiavellian Prince as the agent of French-Canadian failure, now he seems more forgiving of these weaknesses, and reconceptualizes his image of the Prince.14 Following his mother’s request, Sébastien approaches a hospital administrator (Lise Roy), whose bureaucratic discourse epitomizes the useless rhetoric that bores the Prince of the barbarians. When he offers her a bribe of several hundred dollars, she initially turns him down, claiming, ‘This is silly. We’re not in the Third World.’ But when he insists, she does keep the money and sends him to the union. The administrator’s line and her implicit acceptance of the bribe make a subtle but crucial point: the barbarian practices of the Third World, however offensive to the delicate sensibilities of the civilized bureaucrat, are shown to have now become the new modus operandi of the degenerating First World. Flashing a wad of cash, Sébastien easily convinces the union leader (Jean-Marc Parent) to build Rémy a decent room on an abandoned floor of the hospital. While Arcand could be accused of falsely depicting unions as hotbeds of corruption and self-

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congratulatory ineffectiveness,15 his own cameo appearance as a dishonest union member puts an ironic spin on his social commentary. After Sébastien’s laptop computer has mysteriously disappeared and he has asked the union for help in finding it, Arcand emerges from the union office with laptop in hand. The insinuation that the computer was stolen and has now been returned once it becomes clear that it is in the union’s best interests to keep on good terms with the Prince, implies that everyone is now involved in the barbarian way of doing business. Act I ends at night, as a disheartened Rémy looks out the window at the inner-city highway before him. Act II begins, as Act I did a half-hour earlier, with sister Lazure walking down a hospital hallway. However, now the hallway is quiet and sunny. The neon lights have been replaced by natural light, and there are no ailing patients or broken-down equipment encumbering the space. The camera is no longer following Constance from behind, but rather showing her smiling face as she discovers the comfortable bedroom built for Rémy with his son’s money. ‘Look at this. Are you pals with the Premier or a hockey star?’ she asks. ‘His son takes care of him,’ responds Louise. While Act II is not made up exclusively of perfectly blissful moments, it nonetheless exudes much more cheerfulness than the dark, messy first act. As an example, the earlier name mix-up that had irritated Rémy at the beginning of Act I, finds a counterpart in Act II when a doctor (Jean-René Ouellette) mistakes the professor for another patient. But now the confusion triggers laughter rather than anger. After examining him, the doctor happily says: ‘Wonderful, Mr. Parenteau.’ ‘Thanks so much, Dr. Dubé’ answers a giggling Rémy. ‘I’m not Dr. Dubé.’ ‘How fitting, because I am not Mr. Parenteau.’ Rémy laughs as the perplexed physician leaves the room. The system itself remains inefficient, but the patient’s attitude has changed drastically. This results in part from the fact that Rémy has now discovered the numbing pleasures of heroin,

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but also, and more important, because he has reconnected with his old companions and is in the process of opening his mind and his heart to the younger generation. Immediately after Sister Lazure arrives in Rémy’s new room, Dominique and Diane come in bearing flowers and throwing ironic praises at their bed-ridden friend: ‘Lewd! Bestial! Debauched! Lascivious!’ As they all hug, the Handel variations are heard on the soundtrack. This is the moment that those of us who love Le Déclin have been waiting for. ‘How are you, you lusty sinner?’ asks Diane. ‘Better!’ says Rémy joyfully. We too feel better, now that we see our beloved characters from the 1986 film return for our viewing pleasure. Pointing to Gaëlle, Louise, Diane, and Dominique, Rémy tells Constance, ‘You see Sister? My exquisite daughter-in-law, my heroic wife, and two most charming mistresses. I can die in peace.’ This witty line, in fact, summarizes the rest of the film. With his family and friends around him, Rémy can pass on without fear. Claude and Pierre soon join in to complete the circle. Much of Act II features witty exchanges among the six old friends as they relish delicious wine and food in Rémy’s private room (Rémy also enjoys one final instance of sensuality in the form of a heavenly rubdown performed by a Bulgarian nurse). Claude, accompanied by his Italian boyfriend Alessandro (Toni Cecchinato), explains with tonguein-cheek pomposity how he got his undemanding job as director of the Canadian University Institute of Rome by sleeping with people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘Who should I have slept with to get that job?’ asks Diane. ‘I am afraid that the people I slept with would have been blind to your charms, however abundant they are,’ replies Claude while squeezing her breasts with feigned lust. This is one of the scenes in which the ensemble acting that invigorated Le Déclin surfaces in Les Invasions barbares. The moment, for instance, when Claude casually pops a grape in Pierre’s mouth as he walks around the room entertainingly bragging about the bureaucratic quagmire that allows his institute to

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6.2. Rémy surrounded by the women he loves. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

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dodge funding cutbacks, briefly recreates the atmosphere of authentic camaraderie that characterizes most of Le Déclin. Constructed primarily around dyadic interactions – between Louise and Rémy, Rémy and Sébastien, Rémy and Nathalie – where peripheral characters like Gaëlle are often silent, Les Invasions comprises fewer genuine ensemble scenes, where everyone participates, than Le Déclin. But those it does include function as well as those in the 1986 original. Another such ensemble scene is when Diane indulges in some witty chatter about the old cowboy she is currently dating and with whom she recently had a fight. Moving around the space, interacting with Dominique or Pierre, stopping when she notices that Rémy has dosed off and starting again when he wakes up, she recounts to her friends: ‘The other day, as a compliment, I said to my cowboy: “to think we can still have sexual flings at our age.” He was incensed. He doesn’t want to be a sex object, talks about his masculinity ... goes on about exploring his feminine side, his inner me. It was unbearable. The last thing I want is a limp-dicked sentimentalist. I want to be screwed forcefully. That’s all.’ But Diane seems to be the only one of the group whose sexual drive remains at full speed. Dominique has given up on sex altogether. ‘Now, my nocturnal pleasures are provided by my giant-screen Toshiba at the foot of my bed ... I’ve closed the store, laid down my arms, hung up my skates.’ Pierre and Claude also admit, in turn, that their sex lives are not what they used to be. And even Rémy’s legendary concupiscence has waned. Given the age of the characters, it is not surprising that the gender opposition that dominated Le Déclin would recede in Les Invasions. Secondary sexual characteristics fading away with age, men and women become less different physically and perhaps also mentally and psychologically. Generational differences rather than gender become the great divider here. Not surprisingly, observes Pierre Barrette, Arcand puts an ocean between father and son and almost the entire planet between

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Rémy and his daughter.16 The generational divide is also obvious in Pierre’s relationship with his young wife, Ghislaine (Mitsou Gélinas). ‘She’s given me two girls who’ve transformed my life. A mere brush of her hand,’ Pierre tells his friends about his wife, ‘makes me as hard as a bull. Which you’ll agree is a godsend at our age.’ While this suggests that sexuality might offer a means to bridge the generational gap, the reality of Ghislaine and Pierre’s relationship proves less idyllic. Many critics have noted that Arcand’s caustic look at society never falls into depressing morbidity, thanks to the genuine affection he manifests towards his characters.17 Arcand does show affection for most of his characters. But not for Ghislaine, who is represented as a selfish brat, referred to as a child by Rémy and ridiculed by Claude because ‘her breasts outweigh her brain.’ Claude’s insult is not only petty and clichéd, but also rather inapplicable, since Ghislaine does not have particularly large breasts. But Arcand seems to take malicious pleasure in insulting the ‘dumb blonde,’ who functions as little more than an object of ridicule. This hints at the fact that, while the female characters from Le Déclin might have now gained some degree of existence beyond their function as men-in-drag, the other women in the film still do not function as fully fledged human beings. Rather, they are embodiments of patriarchal stereotypes of the feminine: Gaëlle is the silent beauty, the ‘perfect fiancée,’ as Nathalie describes her; Nathalie is the dark angel who introduces Rémy to the realm of blissful oblivion; and Ghislaine, as we know, is the bitch bombshell. Arcand’s contempt for Ghislaine is especially evident in the longer version of the film, which includes a few extra scenes showing her youthful arrogance and callousness. The first time she appears at the hospital in the shorter version, she expresses impatience towards Pierre through an unsympathetic look. Then, as they enter the hospital room, she puts on a smile. In the longer version, we witness a few more seconds before the arrival in the room that amplify her insensitive nature.

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‘We’re not staying long all right? We’ve got to get to Costco’s before 6:00, and Mom’s expecting us at 5:30,’ she barks. ‘Yes, all right’ replies a hen-pecked Pierre. In a later scene, absent from the shorter cut, she harangues Pierre for having lunch on a regular basis with a former mistress (Macha Grenon). A scene that never made it to either version, but appears in the screenplay, suggests that husband and wife argued about having children. Again, Ghislaine imposed her will on her husband.18 The scene in which she appears at her nastiest, however, is when Sébastien asks Pierre if he may borrow the keys of his country house so he can bring Rémy to this more serene environment. Pierre gladly acquiesces, but Ghislaine snaps: ‘I’m the one who decorated it ... The hours at Ikea, don’t they count? Or the curtain I sewed? You lend our house to strangers without asking!’ She evidently belongs to the youthful generation of barbarians, who worship a superficial world of objects, and for whom humanist values are irrelevant.19 Pierre resists: ‘Rémy is not a stranger.’ ‘That’s why Nicole divorced Tom Cruise! He’d lend their Colodaro home to anybody,’ she retorts. ‘I’m lending my house to my friend Rémy,’ asserts Pierre, ‘and you shut up!’ She then threatens to leave him, but in a typical show of cowardice she returns at the end of the film. By presenting Ghislaine in an utterly negative light, Arcand seems to be saying that, as much as there can be reconciliation between the old and the young, they should never marry, for hell hath no fury like a blonde barbarian scorned. Ghislaine’s polar opposite is Nathalie. Whereas Ghislaine is the loud blonde, who spurts out babies, Nathalie is the black-haired heroin addict, who rejects the world of objects and the Ikea version of the good life. When she first meets with Sébastien, after Diane has put them in contact, she emerges from a dark alley like the angel of death, with eerie music accompanying her ghostly entrance. Much later in the film, just before he expires, Rémy refers to her as his ‘guardian angel.’ She accepts Sébastien’s offer to find heroin for Rémy in exchange for money and

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drugs for her own consumption. But one senses that she is not doing this for the cash or even for the drugs. Something else drives Nathalie. While Rémy might represent the past, and Sébastien the future, there is something atemporal about Nathalie. Perhaps more than any other character in the film, she functions as a symbol rather than a person – a symbol of the feminine as the unfathomable repository of an unknowable truth. Disenchanted with the promiscuous lifestyle of her babyboomer mother, she broke ties with Diane in the same way as Sébastien initially turned his back on his father. But she also refuses to abide by Sébastien’s petty materialism. One night, when she fails to bring Rémy his daily fix, Sébastien scolds her: ‘Wake up. We’ve a contract!’ ‘What contract?’ she asks in a daze. She is neither the sensual socialist nor the puritanical capitalist. Rather, she is the ghost of the literary. In more realist terms, she is the one young character who embraces serious literature. While Ghislaine reads new-age self-help books like La voie secrète de la guérison, Nathalie works as a reader for Boréal, the important Quebec press that publishes, among many other oeuvres, Arcand’s own screenplays. Furthermore, heroin is also linked to literature through Levac’s comment to Sébastien that it is the drug of poets. Most significant, however, at the very end of the film, when Sébastien lends her his father’s apartment, Nathalie walks into the dead professor’s study, lightly touching a book on his desk. A few shot-reverse-shots connect her to Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man, Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ciorian’s History and Utopia, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and Pepys’s Diary. All books that mean nothing to Sébastien – or to Ghislaine for that matter – but that for Rémy were texts that allowed him to elevate himself above the mediocrity of his ‘pathetic trysts in poorly heated East-end flats.’ Nathalie represents the mystery of literature, which is why Rémy trusts her and feels he can tell her about his loves, his fears, and his disappointments. Parallel to the group scenes in broad daylight during which Rémy

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6.3. Nathalie is oblivious to Sébastien’s entreaties. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts

and his gang relive the witty old days of Le Déclin, Act II comprises the night scenes, where the dying bon vivant inhales drugs and confides in the melancholic heroin addict. The first we hear about Nathalie is when Diane phones her to help Sébastien find heroin for Rémy. In just a few lines spoken by Diane to Nathalie’s answering machine, Arcand immediately conveys the difficult relationship between mother and daughter. First, Diane sighs deeply and then says: ‘Hi sweetheart. It’s mom. It’s Diane. I miss you sweetheart. Look, remember Sébastien, Rémy’s son? You often played together as kids. He wants to meet. He needs some information. So call whenever you like, at any time.’ Whatever one might say about Arcand’s cynicism, his proclivity for clichés, or his tendency to treat women as narrative devices rather than persons, this passage attests to his undeniable knack for dramatic writing. In half-adozen words – ‘Hi sweetheart. It’s mom. It’s Diane.’ – he manages to suggest a highly troubled relationship. That a mother would feel compelled to mention her name after saying ‘it’s mom’ implies a whole array of difficulties between the two women, which probably date back to the time of Le Déclin. In the one scene where Nathalie and Diane interact at the hospital, the mother’s guilt, her fear for her daughter’s life, and the daughter’s affected indifference produce one of the most intensely understated moments in the film. As Sébastien and Rémy reach full reconciliation at the end of the film, Nathalie also makes small gestures of forgiveness towards her mother. This rapprochement, however timid, results in great part from the young woman’s relationship with the dying professor. Rémy and Nathalie are mirror images of one another. Throughout the second half of the film, subtle parallels make this connection clear. For instance, at Pierre’s country house, the dying professor and the heroin addict are the only two characters to turn down the delicious meal that Claude and Alessandro have prepared – their respective physical conditions similarly affect their appetites. In addition to their common

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6.4. Rémy confides in Nathalie. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

6.5. Sébastien and Rémy reach full reconciliation at the end of the film. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts

interest in the literary, they also share a close relationship with death: he is incurably sick and she is only one overdose away from extinction. Both are also self-professed liars. One of the first things Nathalie tells Sébastien is that he should not trust her, for junkies ‘make a habit of lying.’ Moreover, Nathalie also incarnates a different version of Rémy’s disregard for history, already discussed in the section on Le Déclin. The first thing Rémy asks Nathalie is, ‘you don’t remember me?’ which denotes the young woman’s indifference for the past. She is as indifferent to Quebec’s motto, ‘Je me souviens,’ as he is. In an intriguing role reversal, the young woman assumes the position of the experienced lover who tells the novice to cherish his first time as he is about to inhale heroin. ‘The first time is the best. It’s the one you long for.’ Consuming drugs is equated with sex here. A close-up of a cigarette in Nathalie’s lips as she talks of her mother’s numerous lovers, whom she and her sister sometimes saw in the middle of the night when they were children, also associates Rémy’s sexual excess with Nathalie’s addiction. However, the connection that Rémy and Nathalie enjoy is in no way sexual. When the hysterical first mistress, who does not appear at all in the shorter version of the film, barges into Rémy’s private room and sees Nathalie, she immediately assumes that this attractive young woman is another one of Rémy’s flings. The ludicrousness of this assumption is underscored by the fact that the only thing that can save Rémy from the mistress’s insane accusations is Sister Lazure, who can offer him the ‘comforts of faith.’ That religious faith could comfort Rémy is as absurd an idea as the suggestion that Nathalie could be one of his mistresses. The bond between Nathalie and Rémy emerges not from sexual attraction but from her incarnation of Rémy’s belief in the unknowability of both the past and the future. She is the failed historian’s muse; the embodiment of the end of history. This vision contrasts drastically with the vision of the world incarnated by Sébastien, who is a futures trader. ‘We can’t decipher the past, how can we know the

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future?’ says the professor to the young woman who predicts her early death. Likewise, when Rémy gleefully lists all the things he loves – ‘Wine, books, music, women, above all women’ – Nathalie reminds him that what he loves is his past, which is already gone. ‘It’s not the present you cling to’ she tells him ‘It’s your past life. That life is already dead.’ ‘Perhaps,’ responds the dying bon vivant. In a clever bit of intellectual montage, Arcand juxtaposes Rémy’s acknowledgement that the pleasures and beliefs of his past are forever gone with a scene that comments on the death of Catholicism in Quebec. Immediately after the interchange just cited, Gaëlle, an art dealer, is asked to visit a warehouse where religious art is stockpiled. Farther Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier), who was in charge of the massive Oratoire StJoseph in Jésus de Montréal and has now been demoted to custodian of a dark basement full of relics, walks Gaëlle past the heaps of statues, crucifixes, and chalices. Now that the churches are empty and all this staging has been abandoned, Leclerc explains, the ‘authorities would like to find out if it has any value.’ While it might have value for collective memory, says Gaëlle, it could not be sold on the international market. ‘In other words,’ concludes Leclerc, ‘this is all ... absolutely worthless.’ Collective memory is irrelevant. Now that the spectacle of the Catholic mass has lost its appeal, its pretty props have become nothing but rubbish. Like Rémy’s endless succession of one-night stands, all the good wine he has enjoyed, all the music he has listened to, the religious relics have totally lost their meaning. Only books last. Rémy’s only regret is that he never wrote a book. ‘If at least I’d written,’ he mourns. ‘What would you have written?’ asks Nathalie. ‘The Gulag Archipelago. The Periodic Table.’ Whatever he could have written, ‘at least [he’d] have left a mark.’ Michel Brunet left a mark, even if no one has anything to say about Le Présent, le passé et nous. To Rémy’s conclusion that he is a complete failure, Nathalie responds that, thanks to him, his children are not failures. Intriguingly this echoes a line spoken

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by Louise in Le Déclin in which she tells Diane that even if she never completed her doctorate, at least she has her children. As mentioned earlier, Louise’s line is undercut by the flashback of seven-year old Nathalie interrupting her mother and Rémy in bed. The irony, seventeen years later, is that the character who was used in 1986 to challenge the idea that children are ‘something to treasure,’ now makes that very point. Near the end of the film, Sylvaine, who makes only a few appearances through webcasting, corroborates Nathalie’s assertion. ‘I don’t know how you did it,’ says Rémy and Louise’s daughter, ‘but you managed to pass on your lust for life. You and mom raised incredibly strong children. It’s a miracle really.’ Doubts about the value of his life recede as the film reaches its third act, but not because of these comforting lines. Nor is it the relief provided by heroin that assuages Rémy’s feelings of inadequacy. Rather, it is the landscape that allows him to fully accept his own demise. Exactly halfway through the film, as they are driving to Burlington for Rémy’s radiation therapy (which he cannot undergo in Montreal because the ‘machines here are too old’), father and son drive near Lac Memphrémagog. They stop at Pierre’s house. The eerie music on the soundtrack, as images of nature appear on screen, recalls an altered state of mind not unlike that induced by drugs. But unlike the artificial paradise of heroin, the country house and the lake form a concrete space that can engulf and support the dying man, as connoted by a shot of Rémy sitting in his wheelchair at the end of a small pier surrounded by water. For Réal La Rochelle, the shot in which Rémy, sitting on the pier, turns around and smiles at Sébastien in the distance is the moment when he accepts the death that his son will make possible.20 Only by going back to his past life, the life that is already dead, the life of Le Déclin, can Rémy let go of his present life. Act II ends as Rémy leaves the hospital for the lake. As he departs on a stretcher, Sister Lazure bids him goodbye. ‘Embrace the mystery and you’ll be saved,’ she says softly to her friend.

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6.6. Rémy and his friends watch his daughter’s webcast on Sébastien’s laptop. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts

She then tells Sébastien, ‘Say you love him. Tell him and touch him.’ In the shorter version, the scene ends here. Roberta Imboden convincingly argues that this is where the meaning of the film lies. As the film unfolds, there is an increasing sense that what matters is to leave behind the pettiness of civilization and to playfully embrace the mystery of what transcends the everyday. What is remarkable in the film, says Imboden, is that everyone leaves behind old jealousies and misery in order to focus upon Rémy so that he can leave this life with some form of happiness. Thus Arcand implies that if we ‘walk the straight and narrow,’ the humorless, unplayful path that society tells us we must follow in order to be good citizens, we will probably never progress toward the mystery. Our lives will always remain a bit dull, weary, bland and probably selfish. Mystery and miracle do not dwell with these sorts of lives ... the playful force of Arcand’s art moves along a trajectory where dangerous elements mingle with the power of caring, tender love. Through this contradictory, ambivalent world, the film travels toward the mystery that can never be reached, but whose consequence changes the lives that are touched. Even Rémy’s gloomy sense of history is transformed into a history with the possibility of promise. 21

Although Imboden is discussing the shorter version of the film, the longer version includes a few more shots that make her argument even more convincing, as it bears witness to this contradictory mixture of tender care and danger that transcend the pettiness of civil society. Following Sister Lazure’s deeply felt goodbye, a head nurse (Micheline Lanctôt) bursts in, demanding that the rules be followed: ‘What’s this? Checking out without authorization?’ Sébastien, the Prince of the barbarians, rushes towards the nurse and gestures as though he were going to hit her. She runs away in fear, fittingly calling him a ‘savage.’

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Rémy, who clearly enjoys his son’s show of aggression, adds: ‘I never could’ve beaten a woman. Too bad; some did deserve it ... for instance, you, Sister.’ Constance playfully feigns outrage and demands that Rémy be removed from the premises. ‘Get him out of here, for God’s sake! Get rid of him.’ This moment of potential violence against women might not go over too well with some members of the audience. This is perhaps why it was excluded from the more widely circulated, and arguably less risqué, 98-minute version. The same might be said for why the first mistress, as a stereotypical incarnation of feminine hysteria, does not appear in the international version, as is also the case for the more negative depictions of Ghislaine. Arcand seems to have realized that his more controversial portrayals of women as mere dramatic objects might be accepted more easily at home than abroad. Nevertheless, Sébastien’s attack on the head nurse perfectly exemplifies the role of the barbarian as the one whose devastating invasion shatters the laws of civilization and, in the process, liberates the civilized from themselves. The idea of the necessary, if profoundly disturbing, invasion is humorously intimated on the poster that promoted the film in Quebec. Here we see a man’s buttocks through an opened hospital gown: the mandatory anal probe that aging heterosexual men dread might very well be, from the perspective of an average straight man like Rémy, the most barbaric invasion of all. Between the Sister’s jovial request to get rid of Rémy and Sébastien’s actual getting rid of his father through euthanasia, Act III centres on acceptance. Nathalie agrees to follow a detoxication program and reconcile with her mother; Sébastien agrees to get rid of his ever-present cellphone; the baby-boomer intellectuals accept that their staunch ideological commitments have been only a succession of trendy ‘isms’ (‘We’ve been everything. Separatists ... existentialists ... anti-colonialists ... Marxist-Leninists ... structuralists ... feminists ... deconstructionists’); and Louise accepts that Rémy was the ‘man of [her] life’. Most impor-

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6.7. Quebec poster for Les Invasions barbares. © Courtesy of Alliance Vivafilm.

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tant, Rémy accepts his death. On his way to the country house, he confesses to Nathalie that he ‘still can’t come to terms with it.’ Although Rémy Girard does not have the emotional range required to convey his character’s profound anguish before the inevitable disappearance of his consciousness, the words still communicate the void that awaits every human being: ‘I feel as helpless as the day I was born. I haven’t found a meaning.’ But his terror dissipates once he enters the natural landscape of Lac Memphrémagog. He can even talk about death figuratively – in spite of his literal condition – when he recalls meeting an attractive Chinese archeologist, Guo Jing: ‘I enter the dining room of her hotel. I spot her and die. Beauty that could melt Emperor Qin’s 7,000 terra-cotta warriors.’ The friends chat about their collective failures. ‘Why were we so dumb?’ asks Dominique. To which Pierre responds with his theory on collective intelligence. Intelligence dominates at certain times and places, he argues, and retreats at others. Unfortunately for Rémy, ‘born in Chicoutimi, Canada, in 1950,’ intelligence is now nowhere to be found. Reaction shots show the younger generation predictably bored with these cerebral speculations. It is thus not surprising, when night falls and the friends gather around the campfire to smoke a joint and joke around about a French president who died while being fellated by his mistress, that the young are absent. The humour of this joke, which is lost in the subtitles, emerges from the use of a rarified form of literary French to talk about oral sex. More than likely, Sébastien, Nathalie, and Gaëlle would not find this particularly amusing. The generational gap may have been narrowed, but it will never disappear. At dawn, the hour of death, Sébastien and Rémy finally say that they love each other. Whether the ‘I love you’ spoken here is deemed more genuine than David’s ‘I love you’ to Candy and Kane in Love and Human Remains is only a matter of dramatic style. While the final ‘I love you’ of the 1993 film comes at the tail end of a cynical urban thriller and thus

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6.8. Old friends smoking a joint and talking about oral sex. That’s what it’s all about. Courtesy of Cinémaginaire.

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seems tacked on, in Les Invasions the tone has progressively moved towards nostalgia and melodrama. Arcand skillfully builds up emotionality in Act III – with several close ups that show eyes on the verge of tears – to the point where the father-son teary show of love perfectly coincides with the final decision to go ahead with the fatal injection. A nurse arrives to set up, against all rules, the equipment that will allow for the euthanasia to be carried out. The ‘goodbye’ scene is performed in a highly ritualistic fashion. As each character embraces Rémy, the melodrama intensifies. In succession, Alessandro and Gaëlle show sympathy, Diane, Claude and Dominique cry, Pierre and Louise cry and speak a few last words. As each individual moves on after their goodbyes, they stand in the background with their backs to the camera. Nathalie then proceeds to inject the lethal substance in Rémy’s veins. Marie-Josée Croze’s performance at that moment probably won her the best actress award at Cannes. The mixture of tears and awkward smile project a degree of emotional authenticity that masterfully manipulates audience members into shedding a few tears of their own. One of Rémy’s most touching lines, ‘friends, sharing this modest life with you has been a delight,’ remains imprinted on the spectators’ minds as dark clouds mark the passing of the bon vivant. In Jésus of Montréal, the death of Daniel allows the survival of others through organ transplant. Les Invasions barbares avoids this facile metaphor by showing that as much as the death of Rémy may allow for a new communion among the generations – immediately after the euthanasia, Nathalie appears more responsive to her mother – there remains a profound melancholia that shuns the positive ending of Jésus’s humanist Eucharist. One of the final shots of the longer version shows a silent Louise in a large room listening to two young girls playing a sonata by Diabelli on the piano. As Réal La Rochelle observes, the fact that the two girls, plus a younger child sitting next to Louise, are Asian implies that the future of Quebec, after the barbarians have with-

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drawn, will belong to them. The fact that the youngest girl is played by Arcand’s own daughter, Ming Xia, to whom the film is dedicated, supports this argument.22 However, the straightforward reading of openness to the ‘Other’ that has been applied to Jésus de Montréal, resulting from the fact that the people saved by the actor’s death are clearly ethnic others, does not apply so easily to Les Invasions. First, the sense of joy that those saved by ‘Jesus’ express (‘I am so happy’ says one man after he has been equipped with a new heart) is absent from the epilogue of Les Invasions. No one is happy anymore. None of the characters in that brief sequence is even smiling. Furthermore, the music the young Asian pianists are playing belongs to the European corpus. Aren’t those young girls simply in the process of being colonized by the west? Happiness is also absent from other parts of the epilogue. Gaëlle’s ‘I love you’ to Sébastien as they are flying back to England seems cold and distant. Her lack of sincerity is to be expected, however, since she has already mentioned to Rémy in an earlier scene that between Sébastien and her it is ‘Not “love” ... I love you. I love you too much. I don’t love you. You can’t build a life on pop-song philosophy.’ She tells her fatherin-law, ‘Love me tender. Love, love me not. It’s ridiculous.’ Sébastien’s indifferent kiss on her forehead confirms that the barbarians cannot handle ‘love’ very well. Earlier in the epilogue, when Sébastien offers Nathalie his father’s condo, she impulsively kisses him with passion, as though the spirit of Rémy has temporarily possessed her; but she pushes him away. Barbarians are not romantics. Sébastien is stunned and leaves the apartment without saying a word. All that Nathalie is left with are Rémy’s books. Yet, surprisingly, as Rémy passes away, his last thought is not for his beloved books, but rather for an old black-andwhite movie. He recalls a shot from Augusto Genina’s Cielo sulla palude (1949, Heaven over the Marshes), which tells the story of a chaste young girl, Maria Goretti, who is attacked and killed by a young man whose advances she rebuffed.

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Sex, Death, and the Cinema

One of the most amusing moments in the film occurs when Rémy tells the story of his emerging desire for women. At the centre of his legendary concupiscence resides cinema. His first erotic experience followed a screening of Cielo sulla palude, starring Inés Orsini as Maria, which he saw as a teenager at the Chicoutimi seminary. As all the friends are eating spaghetti in the private hospital room, Rémy relates his response to the movie, with some input from Alessandro (ironically the name of the assailant in Cielo) and Pierre, who also remember seeing the film while studying at Jesuit schools: ‘For the whole film, the immortal Inés Orsini is covered from head to toe. But at some point they had to at least suggest the abject nature of the bestial desire of the vile rapist. So the exquisite Maria dips her adorable toes in the ocean. With a regal but modest gesture, she lifts her skirt ... The thighs of Inés Orsini! ... Oh, the rivers of sperm I spilled dreaming of her thighs.’ An insert of Dominique and Diane wiping their mouths as Rémy mentions ‘rivers of sperm’ is a typically Arcandian bit of mischievous perversity. But what is significant from our perspective is that the last image Rémy sees, as his consciousness vanishes, is the shot of Orsini that first appears in the scene described above. Sex, death, and cinema come together as the lustful professor’s dying vision is that of a prudish peasant girl showing her legs in a religiously conservative neo-realist film. What is also significant in

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the scene at the hospital is that, as Rémy mentions other beautiful women who have occupied his dreams – Françoise Hardy, Julie Christie, Chris Evert, Karen Kain – we see images of all of them on screen. This implies that his erotic imagination originates not from literature, as one might have thought, but from audio-visual sources. He does not dream of Odette de Crécy or Brett Ashley or Remedios Moscote. Rather, he is fixated on Inés Orsini and Julie Christie. This seems surprising, for Rémy and his ilk move in the world of the literary, while the audio-visual is the realm of the younger generation, the barbarians. Sébastien is steeped in audio-visual culture because of his passion for video games. And, in fact, Rémy had ridiculed Alain in Le Déclin for being ‘de la génération de l’idiot-visuel,’ a pun on ‘audiovisuel.’ Yet Rémy’s own sexual desires are rooted in images rather than written words. It could be argued that the audio-visual functions as the source of physical pleasure, while the literary leads to the higher pleasures of the intellect. But this argument is undermined by the fact that some of Rémy’s intellectual posturing also emerges from audio-visual forms. In his anecdote about the beautiful Guo Jing, Rémy concludes that he behaved like a cretin with her because his knowledge of modern China came from cinema. Referring to himself, he recalls: ‘and some dumb French Canadian, who’s seen the films of Jean-Luc Godard and read Philippe Sollers, says that the Chinese Cultural Revolution is wonderful! Cretinism doesn’t sink any lower.’ Here, cinema and literature are equated as similarly unreliable sources of knowledge. This entire scene, in which all the ‘isms’ are dismissed one after the other, indeed amounts to a denigration of the literary as a mere vehicle for fleeting trends. ‘At first we were existentialists,’ says Pierre. ‘We read Sartre and Camus,’ adds Dominique. ‘Then Fanon,’ Claude remembers. ‘We became anti-colonialists.’ Rémy jumps in: ‘We read Marcuse and became Marxists ... After Solzhenitsyn we changed. We were structuralists.’ The succession of meaningless ‘isms’ thus associates Sartre, Fanon,

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and Solzhenitsyn with Godard and Sollers as conveyors of empty ideas. It is not a coincidence that this sequence immediately follows Rémy’s lament to Nathalie: ‘I feel as helpless as the day I was born. I haven’t found a meaning.’ All the books he has read, all the art films he has seen, have utterly failed to provide him with answers. What he is left with at the end are ‘the thighs of Inés Orsini.’ The audio-visual might not be superior to the literary as a means of conveying ideas, but at least the former is aware of its own superficial fixation on the body and does not claim to communicate profound thoughts on the meaning of life. Cinema’s only function is to record physicality. If ‘our only certainty is the ability to act with the body’ – to recall Pierre’s reference to Wittgenstein in Le Déclin – then it is to be expected that at the moment when his body ceases to operate, Rémy’s last thought would be about the vanishing image of the body. In reference to the ‘isms’ scene, Arcand says: We were all seduced by all this. I was never totally seduced because I was primarily a filmmaker. So being a filmmaker always puts a distance between you and any kind of ideology. Maybe it’s not for everybody, but at least for me it meant that filming is a way of objectifying things. I was never a card-carrying communist or separatist or whatist because I had to place my camera. I had to choose the angle. I had to choose the lens, which, at the same time, distances you from any kind of ideology. My only ideology was cinema, but I saw it around me all the time. Some of my best friends became Marxists or Trotskyists or feminists; it played a huge part in our lives. And yet when you’re facing death ideologies tend to fade a little bit.1

This comment speaks volumes about the role of cinema in relation to the literary conveyors of ‘isms.’ No matter how much Les Invasions claims to foreground a civilized world of literature struggling against

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the barbarian world of objects, as a film it is anchored in the world of objects. Cinema is not only affixed to the objects it records but also irrevocably implicated in the objects that constitute its apparatus. As a mechanical device meant to reproduce the world of objects on screen, it not only forces the filmmaker to keep his distance from abstract ‘isms,’ but also leads ‘to a tremendous shattering of tradition,’ to quote Walter Benjamin, ‘which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.’2 Cinema is thus an ideal tool of barbarism: it foregrounds objects, interdicts ideology, and destroys civilizations deeply rooted in history. The camera on its tripod recording witty repartees on Sartre and Marcuse or photographing the cover of Pepys’s Diary pulverizes the deep literary tradition that they incarnate, for the camera necessarily embodies books and lecturers. When Rémy lectures to his attentive students at the beginning of Le Déclin, it is his performance, his use of specific professorial gestures, that matter much more than what he says. This point is made hilariously clear in the already mentioned scene of the heteropteryx, where the gestural rhetoric of academia is employed to teach Alain about ‘le cul.’ Similarly, when we see the books in Rémy’s office at the end of Les Invasions barbares, the works appeal to us first in their materiality. What strikes the spectator is the forlorn sadness of the individuals shown in the archival photograph on the cover of Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man, or the contrast between the austere black-onwhite font of History and Utopia and the endless variations of fleshy tones and textures on Nathalie’s face. Cinema empties the book of its content and makes it pure object, detached from the literary tradition whence it stems. But Arcand, like his characters, does express attachment for the traditional forms of civilization that he simultaneously endeavours to obliterate. The tension between admiration for the civilized world and belief in the unstoppable power of the barbarians,3 finds a formal ex-

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pression in Arcand’s reliance on theatrical modes and dramatic structures in the construction of his film. I have argued elsewhere that in film adaptations of plays the centripetal force of theatre interacts with the centrifugal nature of film to produce works where dependence on tradition and history conflict with an urge to blow apart temporal and spatial confines.4 While Les Invasions is not an adaptation of a play, its theatrical composition – its structure, its emphasis on dialogue, its reliance on ensemble acting – similarly collides with the efferent nature of cinema. In other words, Rémy is drama and Sébastien is cinema; or, more precisely, while Sébastien is a filmic character at ease in the global medium of cinema, Rémy is a dramatic character defined by cinema. The father-son dynamic thus becomes a conflict between the old, obsolete, but lively theatre and the new, lucrative, but shallow cinema. In the end, Les Invasions represents reconciliation between a dying form and its grateful progeny. While Arcand’s productive combination of theatrical modes and cinematic techniques – in Les Invasions, as in Le Déclin, Jésus de Montréal, and earlier films like Réjeanne Padovani – is part of his unique signature as an auteur, the father-son dynamic at the centre of his 2003 film seems to belong to a trend that has dominated the Quebec film industry over the last decade. Films exploring father-son relationships have appeared occasionally in the history of modern Québécois cinema, such as Francis Mankiewicz’s Le Temps d’une chasse (1972) and Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Un zoo la nuit (1987). However, this theme has now become one of the prevailing audio-visual tropes of contemporary Quebec culture. Michel Brault’s Quand je serai parti ... vous vivrez encore (1999), Jean-François Pouliot’s La Grande Séduction (2003), Francis Leclerc’s Mémoires affectives (2004), Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), and Louis Saïa’s Les Boys series (1997– 2005) are films from the last ten years that deal with father-son narratives, both literal and figurative, revolving around the need to reconcile the past and present generations. Even films in which the father is typ-

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ically absent, such as Sébastien Rose’s Comment ma mère accoucha de moi durant sa menopause (2003) and Philippe Falardeau’s Congorama (2006), still explore the contemporary issue of the Québécois’s problematic desire to find and redeem the lost father. I have observed elsewhere that, as Quebec’s population grows older and the national dream rapidly fades away, nostalgia and a fixation on ancestral roots have become the dominant ethos in the province since the 1990s.5 Finding the lost father seems to have become a central metaphor for the Québécois’s search for an identity anchored in the past. Like Professor Saint-Arnaud, who could see signs of the decline of the empire everywhere in 1980s Quebec, I would argue that signs of nostalgic longing can be found throughout the entire spectrum of cultural production of the last ten or fifteen years. That recent blockbuster hits such as Séraphin, un homme et son péché (Charles Binamé, 2002), La Grande Séduction, C.R.A.Z.Y., Maurice Richard (Charles Binamé, 2006), and, of course, Les Invasions barbares are drenched in nostalgia is only the most obvious indication of this phenomenon. As early as 1992–3, former Premier Pierre Marc Johnson noted the nostalgic tendencies of Quebeckers,6 and a survey made in 2000 confirmed this impression.7 Throughout the 1990s journalists, sociologists, artists, and the people in general expressed their longing for the father by asking themselves, ‘who are we?’ and ‘where do we come from?’ as philosopher Serge Cantin phrased it in 1999.8 In his 1993 book Genèse de la société québécoise renowned sociologist Fernand Dumont argued that it is normal for a nation whose sense of identity is disappearing to want to return to its sources to understand its current circumstances.9 This search for origins has taken many forms, including an assertion of the patriarchal lineage of old-stock French Canadians. Indeed, the ‘Fédération des familles-souches québécoises’ (literally translated as the ‘Federation of Quebec’s “root families”’), which had existed since 198310 but started gaining momentum only after 1990,11 organized in 1992 a

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‘huge meeting of all Quebec families’ for Montreal’s 350th anniversary.12 The Tremblays, Bouchards, Gauthiers, Fourniers, and Vachons all were to be honoured. But not the Weinmanns, Wongs, Aranquizs, Mankiewiczs, Tanas, or Obomsawins. This emerging concept of ‘root families’ clearly attempted to reassert the ontological identity of the true Québécois through the name of the father in contrast to other families who came after the fall of New France and therefore are not quite as Québécois as others. Others expressed a longing for the French Canada of the Quiet Revolution, which was ‘much more stimulating intellectually than today’s Quebec,’13 the moment when Quebec opened itself to the world and blindly embraced all the ‘isms’ that Rémy and his friends remember fondly. Others still longed for a pre-Quiet-Revolution Quebec. For instance, certain historians tried to redeem the legacy of Premier Maurice Duplessis, who has generally been deemed the most savagely authoritarian of Quebec’s politicians,14 or lamented the disappearance of the Jesuits’ ‘collège classique,’ replaced by secular, hippy-friendly CÉGEPs in the late 1960s.15 Even the Catholic Church, the embodiment of pre-modern Quebec, regained some of its past glory. In 1990 sociologist Raymond Lemieux insisted that Catholicism still represented the anchor for Quebec culture, which allowed for the construction of personal and historical identity,16 to say nothing of the recent debates, especially virulent in small towns, about the need to protect Quebec’s Catholic heritage from the threat of Muslim immigrants.17 There has also been a renewed interest in folklore. The recent success of ‘raconteur extraordinaire’ Fred Pellerin attests to the revival: this young man’s tall tales about idiosyncratic characters, both real and imaginary, from his picturesque hometown of Saint-Élie-de-Caxton have captivated Québécois since the early 2000s.18 The search for origins has also been expressed through a specific and

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personal quest: the search of adopted children for their biological parents. While obviously not unique to Quebec, it became something of a phenomenon in the province in the early 1990s. In a 1991 article entitled ‘Pour répondre à la question de base: ‘Qui suis-je?’ Daniel Lemay examines the emergence of this movement in 1990.19 A special television show, on ‘Mouvement Retrouvailles,’ broadcast in May 1991, brought the search for personal origins to the forefront of the Quebec collective consciousness. While dealing with the specific issue of the search for biological parents, the show asked its audience the general and evocative question, ‘Êtes-vous pour ou contre le droit aux origines?’ – literally translated as ‘Are you for or against the right to origins?’ Of the Québécois surveyed, 99 per cent answered ‘For!’20 The question not only referred to the personal search of adopted children, but in its broadness also appealed to the search for origins of an entire nation. Sébastien’s need to reconnect with Rémy bears witness to this search for origins. All the sons who appeared in recent Quebec films, trying to reconcile with their fathers, as well as the many cinematic fathers who seek to create new sons express a desperate attempt to cling to an evaporating Quebec identity. The marginality of women in this narrative is no coincidence. As discussed at length in a previous chapter, the emergence of feminism has left patriarchy unable to imagine a type of woman outside the dichotomy of the feminine and the masculine. For the patriarch there can only be either ‘real’ women – feminine, sexually available, or motherly – or women who are, in fact, men in drag. While a younger generation of males might very well have managed to fully adapt to the new gender dynamic, older men (certainly those of Arcand’s generation) still have to deal with their stubborn binary sexism. Within this frame of mind, the feminine cannot provide a constructive solution. Louise might be the most morally admirable character of Les Invasions barbares, but she cannot achieve any-

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thing. From the very beginning of the film she calls Sébastien because she cannot handle the situation alone. She has tried to get better care for Rémy but has failed. The mother and (ex)wife can cajole and hug, but she cannot do anything. Only the man, the son, can act. Gaëlle, Dominique, Diane, and Sister Constance are equally comforting but ineffectual. The only thing the feminine woman can do is rock the child to sleep. No wonder Nathalie’s crucial role rests in her ability to put Rémy to sleep. Daniel Poliquin, in his collection of essays In the Name of the Father: an Essay on Quebec Nationalism (2000),21 observes that, within the Quebec nationalist ethos, if the father disappears, all the mother can do is consol the forsaken son. ‘We may be sure that the psychodrama of the Quebec nation and its father will end like one of Michel Tremblay’s plays: “Papa is gone, he botched this up, it wasn’t his fault, maybe he’ll be back one day, don’t cry, mama is there. Mama will always be there. Go back to sleep.”’22 The Québécois male who still believes in the feminine-masculine dichotomy has only two choices: either reconnect with daddy, or die in the arms of mommy. Since daddy himself is dead, there seems to be little choice left for sonny boy: be put to sleep or leave Quebec.

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Conclusion: Sex, Death and Boredom

From Le Déclin to Les Invasions, Arcand traces the decline of Quebec’s national dream and the Québécois’s last attempts to cling to a sense of self in resistance to the centrifugal forces of barbaric globalization. While the French-Canadian bon vivant has passed away and the more talented and ambitious members of the younger generation have left the fatherland for greener pastures, what of those who are left behind in Quebec? If Rémy is dead and Sébastien has moved on, who remains? Jean-Marc Leblanc (Marc Labrèche), the central character of Arcand’s 2007 film L’Âge des ténèbres. A bored civil servant who lacks Rémy’s sexual energy and Sébastien’s wealth, Jean-Marc has nothing going for him other than the fertile imagination that allows him to escape his meaningless existence and enter a world of fantasy. In his real life, Jean-Marc is ignored by his wife (Sylvie Léonard) and despised by his boss (Caoline Néron). He has not had sex in over a year, must commute for hours every day, and lives in a large but characterless house in a neighbourhood where all the houses equally resemble tacky, suburban castles. He has to hide behind a cement pillar to enjoy his daily cigarette, for smoking is prohibited within one kilometre of any government office – in this case, Montreal’s Olympic stadium, which has now been overtaken by bureaucrats. Working for the Quebec Ombudsman, he spends his days listening to the complaints of citizens,

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about which he can do nothing. One of his clients is Pierre. Now divorced from Ghislaine, Pierre has lost everything and lives in poverty; he is on sick leave from the university and cannot afford a decent house. His last recourse is to complain to the Ombudsman about the array of unfair rules and regulations, laws and bylaws, that have conspired to create his current circumstances. Jean-Marc can do no more than refer Pierre to another agency that will prove as ineffectual as his own department. To escape all this, Jean-Marc imagines himself to be a famous author, a successful politician, the leading man in a romantic opera, an indefatigable lover who can satisfy a succession of beautiful mistresses. In a clever plot twist, Arcand introduces a group of characters who, like Jean-Marc, are desperate to escape reality. They are ‘medievalists,’ members of a society for creative anachronism. While trying his luck at speed dating, Jean-Marc meets a woman who claims to be Princess Béatrice de Savoie (Macha Grenon). At first, the spectator might think that she is somewhat mentally deranged. But it turns out that she lives a parallel life of weekends spent in an isolated ‘medieval’ castle where men from all walks of life become knights and fight for her hand. The central metaphor of the film, expressed in the title’s reference to the dark ages, is most manifest in the scenes unfolding at the medievalist gatherings. Here, demoralized, paranoid French Canadians, whose everyday lives have become meaningless and whose society is falling apart (news of plague and pestilence saturate the airwaves), congregate to recreate a time of similar acculturation and disease, but when all woes could be publicly blamed on barbaric infidels. For instance, a police officer (JeanRené Ouellet), dressed up as a medieval preacher, bellows apocalyptic tirades against the Muslim invaders who were as menacing a thousand years ago as they are now. This implicitly recalls Detective Levac’s comments about the Middle-Eastern invasion of the Montreal underworld

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in Les Invasions. While in the modern city the police officer must whisper his comments in the private space of Sébastien’s luxury car, within the context of the medievalist weekend, the cop-as-medieval-monk can scream at the top of his lungs to a roaring crowd that Islam is the root of all evil. This anachronistic environment initially appeals to Jean-Marc, as it offers him at once an escape from the everyday and the possibility of actual human contact. But soon this option becomes as inadequate as his intangible fantasy world. Its very materiality – our hero endures great physical pain when fighting the Black Prince to earn the right to marry the Princess – and the frustrating rules of the game that must be respected – even defeating the Black Prince is not enough to get Béatrice in bed – make this ersatz world disappointing. They may pretend to be from the Romanesque era, but the medievalists remain mediocre suburbanites who are bound by petty conventions and mundane protocols. The failure of Jean-Marc’s foray into the Dark Ages marks a shift in the film. Early in the narrative, the succession of crazy fantasies is played for laughs. But as the drama unfolds, especially after the medievalist debacle, the escapist option becomes increasingly untenable. The most drastic change from light-heartedness to despair, however, comes at another point, when Jean-Marc loses his last link to his own past. Throughout the film, Jean-Marc regularly visits his dying mother at a hospice. In polar opposition to the father-son narrative of Les Invasions barbares, the mother-son relationship in L’Âge des ténèbres does not lead to a sentimental reconciliation. The mother is no longer fully aware of her surroundings and barely communicates with her son. She dies in her hospital bed without heart-felt goodbyes from her friends. Hers is not the ideal death that Rémy enjoys. She dies as most of us probably will die: a lonely, undignified, indifferent death. Once Poliquin’s cajoling

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mother has passed on, Jean-Marc is left alone. He himself admits that she was the last person who gave him a sense of belonging. His only option then is to return to nature. Near the end of the film, Jean-Marc moves away from the suburbs to his parents’ remote cabin by the Saint Lawrence River. Here, he resembles Rémy and a long list of characters from French-Canadian cinema, ranging from Claude in Le Chat dans le sac to Doctor Lewis in La Grande Séduction, who find solace in Quebec’s rural landscape. Once in the countryside, he relinquishes his fantasy life, with each of his imaginary mistresses evaporating into thin air as he recognizes their irrelevance. He then reconnects with the simple but lasting pleasures of interacting with the natural world. Among other things, he volunteers to do manual work at a nearby hermitage where Sister Lazure and Father Leclerc now live.1 The last scene of the film shows him taking some joy in the simple gesture of peeling an apple. ‘In the end,’ Arcand has said about L’Âge des ténèbres, ‘true happiness is peeling an apple, but it usually takes a while to discover this.’2 The penultimate shot of Jean-Marc holding the knife to the apple bears witness to the gratifying tactile experience of feeling the form, texture, and consistency of a fruit whose negative Christian symbolism vanishes behind its salubrious quintessence. This image is reminiscent of the medieval knight (Max Von Sydow) in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), who finds refuge from a meaningless world of ignorance and disease in the simple pleasure of eating wild strawberries and drinking milk. But for Arcand, as for Bergman, such simple pleasures are not quite enough. While the last live-action shot of L’Âge des ténèrbres is of JeanMarc peeling an apple, this image dissolves into a still life of a bowl of fruit. This suggests that the concrete pleasure of using one’s hands to connect with the natural world does not suffice. Creativity and art, represented by the painting that concludes the film, are necessary to elevate the everyday gesture beyond its seeming banality. Here, I believe,

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is where Arcand expresses, perhaps unwittingly, his latent optimism. No matter how pessimistic he seems to be in L’Âge des ténèbres, Les Invasions, Le Déclin, and Réjeanne Padovani, his biting sarcasm and dark cynicism are always redeemed by his commitment to the artistic power of cinema. In the process of depicting a despondent Quebec culture crumbling under the weight of its misguided nationalist aspirations, Arcand always paradoxically reaffirms the Québécois’s greatest asset: the power of imagination to create compelling art out of the humdrum reality of everyday life. No wonder Quebec cinema continues to attract large local audiences. The national dream might no longer propel Quebec culture, but creativity remains. While Thanatos lurks in the shadows of Quebec’s movie theatres, biding his time, Eros continues to project his lusty light onto the blank screens of the nation.

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Filmography

L’Âge des ténèbres (2007) (Days of Darkness; The Age of Ignorance) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 104 minutes Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Cinémaginaire Inc. Mon Voisin Productions / Ciné-ra Producers: Denise Robert and Daniel Louis Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Guy Dufaux Editor: Isabelle Dedieu Production Designer: François Séguin Sound: Marie-Claude Gagné Music: Philippe Miller Assistant Directors: Marc Larose, Johanne Boudreau, Fabrice Barrilliet, Émilie Malot Principal Cast: Marc Labrèche (Jean-Marc Leblanc), Diane Kruger (Véronica Star), Sylvie Léonard (Sylvie Cormier-LeBlanc), Emma de Caunes (Karine Tendance), Didier Lucien (William Chérubin), Pierre Curzi (Pierre), Gilles Pelletier (Raymond Leclerc), Johanne-Marie Tremblay (Constance Lazure)

Filmography

Les Invasions barbares (2003) (The Barbarian Invasions; Invasion of the Barbarians) Country: Canada/France Language: French Runtime: 98 min / 112 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Astral Films, Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), Cinémaginaire Inc. Producers: Daniel Louis, Denise Robert, Fabienne Vonier Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Guy Dufaux Editor: Isabelle Dedieu Production Designer: François Séguin Sound: Michel Descombes Music: Pierre Aviat Assistant Directors: Jacques Benoit, Pierre Bouchard, Simon Dugas Principal Cast: Rémy Girard (Rémy), Stéphane Rousseau (Sébastien), Dorothée Berryman (Louise), Louise Portal (Diane), Dominique Michel (Dominique), Yves Jacques (Claude), Pierre Curzi (Pierre), Marie-Josée Croze (Nathalie), Mariana Hands (Gaëlle)

Stardom (2000) Country: Canada/France Languages: English/French Runtime: 100 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Alliance Atlantis Communications, Canal +, Centre National de la Cinématographie, Cinémaginaire, Ciné B. Producers: Philippe Carcassonne, Brigitte Faure, Eric Landau, Robert Lantos, Daniel Louis, Denise Robert Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand, Jacob Potashnik Cinematography: Guy Dufaux

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Editor: Isabelle Dedieu Production Designer: Zoe Sakellaropoulo Sound: Claude La Haye Music: François Dompierre Assistant Directors: Agnieszka Poninska, Buck Deachman, Matthew Gledhill, David Lawley-Wakelin, Brian Moon, Manuel Pouet Principal Cast: Jessica Paré (Tina Menzhal), Dan Aykroyd (Barrie Levine), Gregory Calpakis (Steve Bourque), Robert Lepage (Bruce Taylor), Thomas Gibson (Renny Ohayon), Frank Langella (Blaine de Castillon)

Joyeux Calvaire (1996) (Poverty and Other Delights) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 89 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Company: Cinémaginaire Producer: Denise Robert Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Claire Richard Cinematography: Guy Dufaux Editor: André Daignault Production Designer: Patrice Bengle Sound: Richard Besse Music: Yves Laferrière Assistant Director: Jacques Benoit Principal Cast: Gaston Lepage (Marcel), Benoît Brière (Joseph), Lorne Brass (Stanley), André Melançon (Armand)

Love and Human Remains (1993) (Amour et restes humains) Country: Canada Language: English Runtime: 98 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Max Films, Atlantis Films

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Filmography

Producers: Roger Frappier and Peter Sussman Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Brad Fraser from his play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love Cinematography: Paul Sarossy Editor: Alain Baril Production Designer: François Séguin Sound: Dominique Chartrand Music: John McCarthy Assistant Director: Olivier Asselin Principal Cast: Thomas Gibson (David), Ruth Marshall (Candy), Cameron Bancroft (Bernie), Mia Kirshner (Benita), Joanne Vannicola (Jerri), Matthew Ferguson (Kane), Rick Roberts (Robert)

‘Vue d’ailleurs’ (‘Seen from Afar’) segment of Montréal vu par … (1991) (Montreal Sextet) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 20 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Atlantis Films, Cinémaginaire Producer: Denise Robert Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Paule Baillargeon Cinematography: Paul Sarossy Editor: Alain Baril Music: Yves Laferrière Principal Cast: Rémy Girard (Consul), Domini Blythe (Old Lady), Paule Baillargeon (Consul’s Wife), Guyliaine Saint-Onge (Young Woman), Raoul Trujillo (the Lover)

Jésus de Montréal (1989) (Jesus of Montreal) Country: Canada/France Language: French

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Filmography

Runtime: 119 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Max Films, Gérard Mital Productions Producers: Roger Frappier, Pierre Gendron, Doris Girard, Gérard Mital, JacquesÉric Strauss. Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Guy Dufaux Editor: Isabelle Dedieu Production Designer: François Séguin Sound: Patrick Rousseau Music: Yves Laferrière, François Dompierre, Jean-Marie Benoit Assistant Director: Mireille Goulet Principal Cast: Lothaire Bluteau (Daniel Coulombe), Johanne-Marie Tremblay (Constance Lazure), Gilles Pelletier (Father Raymond Leclerc), Rémy Girard (Martin Durocher), Robert Lepage (René Sylvestre), Catherine Wilkening (Mireille Fontaine), Yves Jacques (Richard Cardinal), Denys Arcand (Judge)

Le Déclin de l’empire américain (1986) (The Decline of the American Empire) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 102 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Corporation Image M & M, National Film Board Producers: René Malo and Roger Frappier Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Guy Dufaux and Jacques Leduc Editor: Monique Fortier Production Designer: Gaudeline Sauriol Sound: Richard Besse Music: François Dompierre Assistant Director: Jacques W. Benoit

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Principal Cast: Dominique Michel (Dominique), Dorothée Berryman (Louise), Louise Portal (Diane), Geneviève Rioux (Danielle), Pierre Curzy (Pierre), Rémy Girard (Rémy), Yves Jacques (Claude), Daniel Brière (Alain), Gabriel Arcand (Mario)

Le Crime d’Ovide Plouffe (1984) (Murder in the Family; The Crime of Ovide Plouffe) Country: Canada/France Language: French Runtime: 107min Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: International Cinema Corporation, Société RadioCanada, National Film Board, Filmax, Film A2 Producers: Gabriel Boustani, Justine Héroux Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand and Roger Lemelin, based on the latter’s novel. Cinematography: François Protat Editor: Monique Fortier Production Designer: Jocelyn Joly Sound: Michel Guiffan Music: Olivier Dassault Assistant Directors: Jacques Benoit, Martha Laing, Monique Maranda Principal Cast: Gabriel Arcand (Ovide Plouffe), Véronique Jannot (Marie), Anne Létourneau (Rita Toulouse-Plouffe), Donald Pilon (Stan Labrie), Pierre Curzi (Napoléon Plouffe), Juliette Huot (Joséphine Plouffe), Denise Filiatrault (Cécile Plouffe), Serge Dupire (Guillaume Plouffe)

Le Confort et l’indifférence (1982) (Comfort and Indifference) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 109min Format: Colour / 16mm Production Company: National Film Board Producers: Roger Frappier, Jean Dansereau, Jacques Gagné

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Filmography

Director: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Alain Dostie; additional images by Pierre Letarte, André Luc Dupont, Martin Leclerc, Roger Rochat, Bruno Carrière, Jean-Pierre Lachapelle, Pierre Mignot Editor: Pierre Bernier, assisted by France Dubé Cast: Jean-Pierre Ronfard (Machiavelli)

Gina (1975) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 94 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Company: Productions Carle-Lamy Producer: Pierre Lamy Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand, assisted by Jacques Poulin, Alain Dostie, Jacques Benoit Cinematography: Alain Dostie, assisted by Louis de Ernsted, Michel Caron, André Gagnon Editor: Denys Arcand Production Designer: Michel Proulx Sound: Serge Beauchemin Music: Michel Pagliaro, Barbara Benny Assistant Directors: Avdé Chiriaeff, France Lachapelle, Jacques Méthé, René Pothier Principal Cast: Céline Lomez (Gina), Claude Blanchard (Bob Sauvageau), Frédérique Collin (Dolorès), Serge Thériault (Assistant cameraman), Gabriel Arcand (the director), Louise Cuerrier (Carole Bédard), Jocelyn Bérubé (Andy Title), Paule Baillargeon (Rita John), Jean-Pierre Saulnier (Marcel Jobin), Roger Lebel (Léonard Chabot), Donald Lautrec (Pierre Saint-Louis)

Réjeanne Padovani (1973) Country: Canada Language: French

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Filmography

Runtime: 94 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Company: Cinak Producer: Marguerite Duparc Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand, assisted by Jacques Benoit Cinematography: Alain Dostie, assisted by Louis de Ernsted, Michel Caron Editors: Denys Arcand, Marguerite Duparc Production Designer: Robert Scheen, Louis Ménard Music: Walter Boudreau, Gluck, interpreted by Margot MacKinnon Assistant Directors: France Lachapelle, Jacques Méthé Principal Cast: Jean Lajeunesse (Vincent Padovani), Luce Guilbeault (Réjeanne Padovani), J. Léo Gagnon (Minister Georges Bouchard), Thérèse Cadorette (Aline Bouchard), René Caron (Mayor Jean-Guy Biron), Hélène Loiselle (Mrs Biron), Roger Lebel (Léon Desaulniers), Margot MacKinnon (Stella Desaulmiers), Céline Lomez (Manon), Pierre Thériault (Dominique Di Moro), Gabriel Arcand (Carlo Ferrara)

Québec: Duplessis et après ... (1972) (Québec: Duplessis and After ...) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 115 min Format: Black and white / 16mm Production Company: National Film Board Producer: Paul Larose Director: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Alain Dostie, Réo Grégroire, Pierre Letarte, Pierre Mignot Editor: Denys Arcand Cast: Gisèle Trépanier, Robin Spry

La Maudite galette (1971) (Dirty Money) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 100 min

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Filmography

Format: Colour/35mm Production Companies: Cinak, Les Films Carle-Lamy, France Film Producer: Marguerite Duparc Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Jacques Benoit Cinematographer: Alain Dostie Editor: Marguerite Duparc Production Designer: Jacques Méthé Sound: Serge Beauchemin Music: Michel Hinton, Gabriel Arcand, Lionel Thériault Assistant Director: André Corriveau Principal Cast: Luce Guilbeault (Berthe), Marcel Sabourin (Ernest), René Caron (Rolland Soucy), Gabriel Arcand (Ti-Bi), J.Léo Gagnon (Oncle Arthur)

On est au coton (1970, released in 1976) (Cotton Mill; Treadmill) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 159 min Format: Black and white / 16mm Production Company: National Film Board Producers: Marc Beaudet, Pierre Maheu Director: Denys Arcand Research: Gérald Godin Cinematography: Alain Dostie and Pierre Mignot Editor: Pierre Bernier Sound: Serge Beauchemin With the participation of Georges Vaillancourt, Edward F. King, Claude Lemelin, Madeleine Parent, Carmen Bertrand, Bertrand Saint-Onge

Parcs atlantiques (1967) (Atlantic Parks) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 17 min Format: Colour/35mm

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Filmography

Production Company: National Film Board Producers: Jacques Bobet, André Belleau Director: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Gilles Gascon, Roger Rochat Editor: Denys Arcand

Volleyball (1966) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 13 min Format: Colour/35mm Production Company: National Film Board Producer: Jacques Bobet Director: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Jean-Claude Labrecque, Jean Roy, Thomas Vamos Editor: Denys Arcand

Les Montréalistes (1965) (Ville-Marie) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 27 min Format: Colour/16mm Production Company: National Film Board Producer: André Belleau Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Andrée Thibault Cinematography: Bernard Gosselin, Jacques Leduc Editor: Monique Fortier Music: Donald Mackey Narration: Gisèle Trépanier, Gilles Marsolais

La Route de l’Ouest (1965) (The Westward Road) Country: Canada Language: French

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Filmography

Runtime: 28 min Format: Colour/16mm Production Company: National Film Board Producer: André Belleau Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Bernard Gosselin Editor: Werner Nold Music: Kenneth Gilbert, Olav Harstad Narration: Christian Delmas

Champlain (1964) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 28 min Format: Colour/16mm Production Company: National Film Board Producer: André Belleau Director: Denys Arcand Screenplay: Denys Arcand Cinematography: Bernard Gosselin, Gilles Gascon Animation: Frédéric Back, Doug Poulter, James Wilson Editors: Werner Nold, Bernard Gosselin Music: Kenneth Gilbert Narration: Gisèle Trépanier, Georges Dufaux

Seul ou avec d’autres (1962) (Alone or with Others) Country: Canada Language: French Runtime: 64 min Format: Black and white / 16mm Production Company: Association générale des étudiants de l’Université de Montréal Producer: Denis Héroux

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Filmography

Directors: Denys Arcand, Denis Héroux, Stéphane Venne Screenplay: Denys Arcand, Stéphane Venne Cinematography: Michel Brault, Jean-Pierre Payette Editors: Gilles Groulx, Bernard Gosselin Music: Stéphane Venne Cast: Nicole Braün (Nicole), Pierre Létourneau (Pierre), Michelle Boulizon (Michelle)

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Notes

Introduction 1 Déclin de l’empire américain won a dozen international awards, including the ‘Prix de la critique internationale’ at Cannes, and eight Genie awards. See ‘Denys Arcand: Filmography,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 167. 2 For box office numbers, see the Appendix in Loiselle and McSorley, Self Portraits, 322. 3 ‘Top 50 du cinema québécois,’ La Presse, 10 February 2007, Cinema 2. 4 Georges Privet, ‘Denys Arcand,’ 14; Richard Therrien, ‘Incontournable,’ Le Soleil, 29 November 2003, C4. 5 Réal La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 78, 164–5. 6 Ibid., 119–121. 7 André Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know Where I Come from, Not Where I Am Going”: A Conversation with Denys Arcand,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 140. 8 Pierre Véronneau, ‘Alone and with Others: Denys Arcand’s Destiny with the Quebec Cinematic and Cultural Context,’ in ibid., 18. 9 Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know,”’ 144. 10 See for instance, Gene Walz, ‘A Cinema of Radical Incompatibilities: Arcand’s Early Fiction Films,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 61. Arcand’s most overt homage to Renoir is probably the presence of a greenhouse on Padovani’s estate, where most of the action involving Réjeanne takes place.

Notes to pages 7–19

11 Véronneau, ‘Alone and with Others,’ 20. 12 Michel Coulombe, Denys Arcand, la vraie nature du cineaste (Montéal: Boréal, 1993), 97. 13 Walz, ‘Cinema of Radical Incompatibilities,’ 64. 14 Loiselle and McIlroy, Introduction, in Auteur/Provocateur, 2. 15 Loiselle, ‘I Only Know,’ 144–5. 16 Coulombe, Denys Arcand, 38–9. 17 Loiselle, ‘I Only Know,’ 146. 18 Ibid., 147. 19 Coulombe, Denys Arcand, 71. 20 Loiselle, ‘I Only Know,’ 147. 21 Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Seventeenth Chapter, Concerning Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved than Feared,’ in The Prince, 92. 22 Lise Bissonnette, ‘La Vengeance et le mépris,’ Le Devoir, 30 January 1982, 12. See Véronneau, ‘Alone and with Others,’ 22. 23 Michael Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand, Renaissance Man,’ Cinema Canada 134 (Oct. 1986): 17. 24 Nick Auf der Maur, ‘Referendum film pretentious bore,’ The Gazette, 10 Feb. 1982. See Véronneau ibid. 25 Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 166. Le Déclin de l’empire américain 1 Michael Posner, ‘The Big Chill with a PhD: Le Déclin de l’Empire Américain (The Decline of the American Empire),’ in Canadian Dreams, 219. 2 Paul-André Linteau et al., Histoire du Québec Contemporain, 726–7. 3 Coulombe, Denys Arcand, 84. 4 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 220. 1: The Production and Reception of Scabrous Conversations 1 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 167. 2 See my comments on the joual phenomenon in Loiselle, Le Cinéma de Michel Brault, 162–6.

174

Notes to pages 20–6

3 Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know Where I Come from, Not Where I Am Going”: A Conversation with Denys Arcand,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 151. 4 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 221. 5 Ibid., 222. 6 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 167. 7 Except where otherwise noted, I use the film’s subtitles as a source to reproduce dialogues. 8 Loiselle, ‘“I only Know,”’ 151. 9 ‘Les hauts et les bas d’un scenario devenu diva,’ Copie Zéro 34–5 (December 1987/March 1988): 60. 10 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 224. See also ‘Arcand Shoots on Closed Set,’ Cinema Canada 124 (November 1985): 52. 11 Serge Dussault, ‘[Festival de] Cannes: succès inattendu sauf pour [René] Malo [du film de Denys Arcand, Le Déclin de l'empire américain]’ La Presse, 18 May 1986. 12 ‘Les hauts et les bas d’un scenario devenu diva,’ 60. 13 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 222. 14 Coulombe, Denys Arcand, 22–3. 15 Jean Faucher, Rémy Girard, 180–1. 16 Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know,”’ 155. 17 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 223. 18 Fortier, ‘Le pré-vu et l’imprévu ou les charmes discrets du montage,’ Copie Zéro 34–5: 47. 19 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 225. 20 ‘Denys Arcand ouvrira la Quinzaine à Cannes,’ La Presse, 2 April 1986. 21 Noel Taylor, ‘Dual Role Divides Cannes,’ Ottawa Citizen, 10 May 1986. 22 Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know,”’ 155. 23 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 225–6. 24 Scott, ‘Eight Genies Fall to American Empire,’ Globe and Mail, 19 March 1987, D-1. 25 Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 227–8. 26 Bachand, ‘La reception critique du Le Déclin de l’empire américain aux ÉtatsUnis,’ Québec Studies 19 (Fall 1994/Winter 1995): 166.

175

Notes to pages 26–43

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38

Faucher, Rémy Girard, 184. Posner, ‘The Big Chill,’ 233. La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 189. Wood, ‘Towards a Canadian (Inter) National Cinema (part 1 of a 2–part article),’ CineAction! 16 (Spring 1989): 61 Loiselle, ‘ “I Only Know,”’ 152. Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand,’ 21. Denise Pérusse argues that Louise is purposefully lying about the orgy as a mechanism of denial concerning her own status as a betrayed wife. See ‘Le Déclin: une stratégie filmique oscillant entre le cliché et l’ironie,’ Copie Zéro 34–5: 51. Brian McIlroy and I discuss Arcand’s dialogic approach in Introduction, Auteur/Provocateur, 21. Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand,’ 21. Ibid., 16. Martel, ‘Le Déclin du patriarcat, 93. On this subject, see studies such as Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering; and Gillian, In a Different Voice.

2: The Decline of Patriarchy and the Death of the Feminine 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand,’ 21. Kael, ‘Current Cinema,’ 85. Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 141–2; my translation. Martel, ‘Le Déclin du patriarcat,’ 92; my translation. In the screenplay Arcand explicitly talks about the meeting as a westernstyle duel. See Arcand, Le Déclin de l’empire américain, 108. Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand,’ 21. Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 162. Arcand, ‘Cinéma et sexualité,’ 95, 97. Martel, ‘Le Déclin du patriarcat,’ 93. Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand,’ 17. See Weinmann’s comments on Mario, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 168.

176

Notes to pages 45–60

12 Pérusse, ‘Le Déclin: une stratégie filmique oscillant entre le cliché et l’ironie,’ Copie Zéro 34–5: 50. 13 Bellemare, ‘Retournement et duplicité,’ Copie Zéro 34–5: 53. 14 Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 169; my translation. 15 Claude, in his cruising anecdote, states that he is ‘not physically brave.’ In a flashback, Rémy is shown to have been terrified at the prospect of being caught in bed with Diane by her husband. And Pierre says that he divorced because he ‘was scared to death of the phone.’ 16 Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 170. 17 Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin,’ 20. 18 These are the subjects that Danielle is studying at the university, which conflict with her masseuse schedule. 19 Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin,’ 20. 20 In fairness, the word reportage that Louise actually uses in the original, does not evoke fiction to the same extent as ‘stories’. 21 Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 156. 22 Nèg is probably as close an equivalent to ‘nigger’ as can be found in Quebec French. Although the word is spelt nègres in the screenplay (see page 86), Rémy Girard clearly pronounces it nèg. 23 Gillian, In a Different Voice, 8. 24 It is my wife, Kerri Froc, who first drew my attention to the similarities that challenge the idea of radical difference between the two insects. 25 Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 142. 26 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 182–3. 27 Hays, ‘Epidemic Amnesia, 42. 3: The Death of Quebec History 1 Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin,’ 17. 2 ‘Conversation autour d’un plaisir solitaire,’ Copie Zéro 34–5, 5. 3 Shek, ‘History as a Unifying Structure in Le Déclin de l’empire américain,’ Québec Studies 9 (1989/1990): 12. 4 Howell, ‘A director in his prime,’ 29, 30. 5 Coulombe, Denys Arcand, 108–9; my translation.

177

Notes to pages 61–7

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

‘Conversation autour d’un plaisir solitaire,’ 5. Ibid., 12. Lyotard La Condition postmoderne; Postmodern Condition. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 60. Morin and Bertrand, Le territoire imaginaire de la culture, 127. Ibid., 140–5. See also Patrick Coleman’s review of both Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne and Morin and Bertrand’s Le Territoire imaginaire de la culture, in French Review 54 (April 1981): 754–5. Clift, Le Déclin du nationalisme, 129. Loiselle, ‘ “I Only Know,”’ 153. Clift, Le Déclin du nationalisme, 153, 157. See my interpretation of this phenomenon in Loiselle, Le Cinéma de Michel Brault, 237–42. Fulvio Caccia, Republic Denied, 47. ‘C'est au Québec que la bureaucratie gouvernementale est la plus lourde à supporter, selon un sondage mené par la FCEI,’ La Presse, 4 May 1988, D5. For instance, while only 48 per cent of Ontarians were opposed to Canada’s participation in the Gulf War, 70 per cent of Quebeckers were against getting involved in the conflict. See Gilles Paquin, ‘La Crise du Golfe,’ La Presse, 16 January 1991, A2. To this day, French Canadians remain much less in favour than other Canadians of engaging in military action abroad. In terms of the invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, while in 2006 English Canadians were still ambivalent on the issue, a clear majority of Quebeckers (66 per cent) wanted to put an end to Canada’s involvement in that colonial war. See Pierre Asselin, ‘Sondage SOM-Le Soleil-La Press,’ Le Soleil, 22 December 2006, 8 ‘Les Québécois sont moins portés sur le bénévolat,’ La Presse, 29 August 1989, A5. Pierre Vennat, ‘L’Image du clergé,’ La Presse, 31 October 1989, B2. Benoît Chapdelaine, ‘Renseignements personnels: les banques n’ont guère la confiance du public,’ La Presse, 13 October 1989, A12. Huguette Roberge, ‘Hémorragie au sein du personnel infermier québécois; l’AHQ parle de crise grave, et l’OIIQ prévoit l’effondrement du système de santé, si Québec ne bouge pas ...,’ La Presse, 30 October 1988, A3.

178

Notes to pages 67–79

23 Marie-France Léger, ‘Les États généraux sur l’éducation se terminent dans l’indifférence,’ La Presse, 2 October 1990, A4. 24 See Jacques Dufresne, ‘Les grèves de la reproduction, hier et aujourd’hui,’ La Presse 17 September 1988, B3, for an interesting discussion on the serious problem of Quebec’s low birth rate in terms of the decline of traditional values. 25 See Linteau et al., Histoire du Québec Contemporain, 211–12. 26 Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 166–7. 27 Fuss, ‘Monsters of Perversion: Jeffrey Dahmer and The Silence of the Lambs,’ Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie Garber et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 188. See also Peter Kwan, ‘Jeffrey Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories,’ Hastings Law Journal 48 (1996–7): 1260. 28 Boldt-Irons, On Bataille, 286–7. 29 Bersani, AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, 222, 212, 217. 30 Brooks, Every Inch a Woman, 168. 31 The author is grateful to queer theorist José Sanchez and feminist scholar Kerri Froc for their help in articulating these issues. 32 Morin and Bertrand, La territoire imaginaire, 119. 33 Richardson, Georges Bataille, 104. 34 Summarizing Bersani’s argument, Carellin Brooks writes that the goal of anal sex: ‘is pleasure, a pleasure based not on equal exchange but on differentials of power and even “a radical disintegration and humiliation of the self,” which paradoxically leads to a freeing of the self’s strictures and a consequent sense of liberation.’ Every Inch a Woman,167. 35 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 196. 4: Friends in the Landscape, or Was Louise Right All Along? 1 Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know,”’ 154. 2 Walz, ‘A Cinema of Radical Incompatibilities: Arcand’s Early Fiction Films,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 56. 3 The subtitles do not include the end of the phrase spoken by Daniel ‘attendre la mort le plus comfortablement possible.’ I translate the passage as ‘as comfortably as possible.’

179

Notes to pages 79–95

4 La Rochelle, ‘Sound design and music as tragédie en musique: the documentary practice of Denys Arcand,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 47. 5 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 167. 6 Harcourt, ‘Le Déclin de l’empire américain, 150–51 7 Bellemare, ‘Retournement et duplicité,’ Copie Zéro 34–5: 53. Les Invasions barbares 1 Loiselle, ‘Une communauté en quête de représentations,’ 24 Images 116/117 (Summer 2004): 12. 2 This scene appears only in the longer version of the film. 3 Michel Vastel, ‘L’Entretien avec Jacques Godbout – Le Québec dans 30 ans? “Complexe,” dit l’essayiste-cinéaste-romancier Jacques Godbout, qui en prédit même la disparition dans 70 ans. 2076: La Fin du Québec!’ L’Actualité 31, no. 13 (1 Sept. 2006): 20. 4 Term used by François Ricard in La Génération lyrique (Montréal: Boréal, 1992) to describe the French Canadian baby boomers who reaped the benefits of the 1960s ‘Quiet Revolution.’ 5: From an Obsession with Death to an Oscar 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois, 253–4. Lockerbie, ‘The Ethnic Other,’ 130. Loiselle, Le Cinéma de Michel Brault, 250–3. The growing xenophobia of Quebeckers, especially in rural areas, culminated in the 2006–7 debate around ‘reasonable accommodations’ for immigrants. See, for instance, Ariane Lacoursière, ‘Mario Dumont comprend Hérouxville,’ La Presse, 4 February 2007, A8. Bart Testa, ‘Arcand’s double-twist allegory: Jesus of Montreal,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provocateur, 91, 102. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 107–8. Ibid., 102.

180

Notes to pages 96–103

9 Majumbar, Francophone Studies: The Essential Glossary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14. 10 ‘Denys Arcand: Filmogrpahy,’ in Loiselle and McIlroy, Auteur/Provovcateur, 167–8. 11 See Pallister, Cinema of Quebec, 394. 12 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 167, 205. 13 Howell, ‘A Director in His Prime,’ 28. 14 Faucher, Rémy Girard, 188. 15 Interestingly, for the most recent reprint of the play (Playwrights Canada, 2006) Fraser has dropped the longer title and adopted the shorter designation of the film. 16 André Loiselle, ‘“I Only Know,”’ 158–60. 17 Scott Morrison, ‘Rebel without a pause,’ Saturday Night, May 1992, 44. 18 See, for instance, Suzanne Dansereau’s reports on some critical responses in ‘Love and Human Remains: ‘L’oeuvre d’un cinéaste divin – Arcand triomphe au Festival of Festivals,’ Le Droit, 13 September 1993, 22. 19 Todd McCarthy, ‘Love and Human Remains,’ Variety, 20 Sept. 1993, 28. 20 Tremblay, ‘Dix ans après le Déclin, il ne reste que la mort,’ Le Devoir, 13 September 1993, B8. 21 Loiselle, Stage-Bound, 199–206. 22 Fraser, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1990), 94, 184–5, 188–9. 23 Fraser, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love / Love and Human Remains. Edmonton: NeWest, 1996. 24 Luc Perrault, ‘Denys Arcand: un auteur en quête d’inspiration,’ La Presse, 30 November 1996, C2. 25 Francine Grimaldi, ‘Brière et Lepage en vedette,’ La Presse 10 April 1996, C6. 26 Laura-Julie Perreault, ‘“15 Moments”: le “starsystem” selon Arcand,’ Le Soleil, 11 May 1999, C5. 27 Mathieu Perreault, ‘Denys Arcand, l’esclave de la beauté,’ Séquences 210 (November/December 2000): 53 28 Francine Grimaldine, ‘Denys Arcand passe de Frappier à Lantos,’ La Presse 1 December 1993, E1. 29 See, for instance, Christian Côté in Le Droit, 28 October 2000; Juliette Ruer in

181

Notes to pages 103–7

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

48

Voir, 26 October 2006; Martin Bilodeau in Le Devoir, 11 November 2000; Liam Lacey in the Globe and Mail, 28 October 2000. See Geoff Pevere, ‘Arcand's Glam Slam Strikes Out Looking: Stardom's Take on Voyeurism, Celebrity, lame and dated,’ Toronto Star, 7 September 2000, C5. Luc Perreault, ‘Arcand: un nouveau film à l’horizon,’ La Presse, 28 February 2001, C4. Pierre Ranger, ‘Les Invasions barbares, Pour la suite du monde,’ Séquences 225 (May–June, 2003): 32. Marc-André Lussier, ‘Un nouveau déclin 15 ans plus tard! La bande se retrouve cette fois au chevet de Rémy,’ La Presse, 11 May 2002, A1. Faucher, Rémy Girard, 189. Marc-André Lussier, ‘Dominique Michel et Rémy Girard, prêts pour Le Déclin Act II,’ La Presse, 11 May 2002, C2. ‘15 ans plus tard, Denys Arcand tourne une suite au Déclin,’ Le Droit, 12 September 2002, 47. Lanctôt’s cameo was cut for the shorter version of the film. Arcand, Déclin de l’empire américain, 6. Jonathan Choquette, ‘Marie-Josée Croze, et la gagnate est ...’ Voir, 29 May 2003, 10. La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 33. See the preface to Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares, 7. Lussier, ‘Un nouveau déclin 15 ans plus tard!’ La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 35–36, 39. While Dupuis also appears in Jésus de Montréal as a police officer, this is not the same character, since they do not have the same name. Dupuis plays Gilles Levac in Les Invasions and Marcel Brochu in Jésus. La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 40. Faucher, Rémy Girard, 192. See, for instance, Voir, 8 May 2003, 14; Le Devoir, 9 May, A1; La Presse, 10 May 2003, C2; 24 Images (Summer 2003): 6–7; Take One 43, September–December 2003; Toronto Star, 15 September 2003, E01. See, for instance, Variety, 26 May / 1 June 2003, 28; L’Avant-scène, September 2003, 96–7; New York Times, 17 October 2003, E15. USA Today, 21 November

182

Notes to pages 107–21

49 50 51 52

2003, 10E; Chicago Sun-Times, 21 December 2003; Sight and Sound, March 2004, 36. ‘Les Invasions barbares ont récolté 35 millions $ depuis un an,’ Canadian Press, 10 May 2004. See, for instance, a 2007 survey of the top fifty Quebec films: http:// www.cyberpresse.ca/top50. See http://www.boxofficequebec.com Nesselson, ‘Invasion of the Barbarians, 28.

6: ‘Death of a Bon Vivant’: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

Marcel Jean, ‘Le Théâtre de la mort,’ 24 Images 115 (Summer 2003): 6. Véronneau, ‘Denys Arcand, 76. Kemp, ‘Last Laugh,’ 37. Monsieur Duhamel might be a character from Jésus de Montréal reappearing here in Les Invasions barbares. Denis Bouchard played a nameless paramedic in Jésus and the screenplay of Les Invasions indicates that Bouchard’s character is a former paramedic (see page 9). The subtitles refer only to Dominique as Raphaëlle’s professor, but in the original French-language line, Rémy says: ‘Raphaëlle Metellus a jamais été dans ma classe, Louise. Elle était avec Dominique et avec Pierre.’ See, for instance, Kemp, ‘Last Laugh,’ and Nesselson, Invasion of the Barbarians. On the use of paradox in Les Invasions barbares see Dundjerovic, ‘Contradictions and Paradoxes.’ Dorland, ‘Denys Arcand, Renaissance Man,’ 16. The French-language line refers to a character from the popular television series ‘Le Temps d’une paix’ (1980–6). Ti-coune was the village idiot, who lived on a farm with his family. Plamondon, ‘Le Déclin de la literature.’ Cavafy, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ 114–15. See, for instance, Kemp, ‘Last Laught,’ 36. Roberta Imboden, ‘Barbarian Invasions,’ Film Quarterly 58, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 49.

183

Notes to pages 122–50

14 Approximately thirty minutes into the longer version of the film, a subtitle indicates that Rémy praises his son as a ‘Prince.’ This translation, however, is not present in the original French dialogue. 15 See, for instance, commentaries by union leader Ann Gingras in Guy Benjamin, ‘La syndicaliste Ann Gingras defend le système de santé,’ Le Soleil, 26 May, 2003, A3. 16 Pierre Barrette, ‘La fin des bacchanals,’ 24 Images 115 (Summer 2003): 5. 17 Marie-Claude Loiselle,‘Une communauté en quête de représentations,’ 24 Images 116/117 (Summer 2004): 12. 18 Arcand, Les Invasions barbares, 103. 19 As Pierre Ranger writes, ‘The new generation represents barbarism for their parents.’ ‘Les Invasions barbares,’ 33. 20 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 42. 21 Imboden, ‘Barbarians Invasion,’ 49, 52. 22 La Rochelle, Denys Arcand, 42. 7: Sex, Death, and the Cinema 1 Howell, ‘Director in His Prime,’ 30. 2 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 221. 3 According to Peter Howell, ‘Arcand is resigned to the way the world has changed; he and his characters have all pragmatically decided to stop fighting and instead just enjoy what little time there is left for them on earth.’ ‘Director in His Prime,’ 29. 4 Loiselle, Stage-Bound, 11–12. 5 Loiselle, Cinéma de Michel Brault, 253–60. 6 Pierre Marc Johnson, cited in Jean-François Lisée, Daniel Latouche, and Christian Rioux, ‘Sondage: L’Avenir et nous 2000,’ L’Actualité 18 (1 January 1993): 21. 7 André Pratte, ‘La messe, les grosses familles, les enfants obéissants: le Québec s’ennuie ,’ La Presse, 15 January 2000, A1. 8 Serge Cantin, ‘Crise de la mémoire collective: Pour sortir de la survivance,’ Le Devoir, 14 August 1999, A9.

184

Notes to pages 150–8

9 Fernand Dumont, Genèse de la société québécoise, 13–14. 10 See the Fédération’s website: www.ffsq.qc.ca/ffsq-01.html 11 The first newspaper article that I have found on the Fédération appeared in La Presse, 23 June 1989, D12. 12 Raymond Gervais, ‘Rencontres monstres des familles québécoises en 1992,’ La Presse, 15 October 1990, A3. 13 Jacques Godbout, ‘Non au prêt-à-penser,’ L’Actualité 19, no.13 (1 Sept. 1994): 4. 14 Think, for instance, of Duplessis: Entre la Grande Noirceur et la société libérale, ed. Alain-G. Gagnon and Michel Sarra-Bournet (Montréal: Les Éditions QuébecAmérique, 1997). 15 See Gilles Marcotte, ‘Ah! Le bon temps du cours classique,’ L’Actualité 17 (1 July 1992): 99; and ‘Les habits troués du pamphlétaire,’ L’Actualité 19 (15 May 1994): 87. 16 Raymond Lemieux, ‘Le catholicisme québécois: une question de culture,’ Sociologie et sociétés 22 (October 1990): 145, 162. 17 On the small town at the heart of the debate, Hérouville, see, for instance, Ariane Lacoursière, ‘Mario Dumont comprend Hérouxville,’ La Presse, 4 February 2007, A8. On the public consultation over ‘reasonable accommodations’ for immigrants, see also Katia Gagnon, ‘Les Québécois rejettent tous les accommodements,’ La Presse, 9 October 2007, A2. 18 See, for instance, Chantal Guy, ‘Fred Pellerin, l’homme fort du conte,’ La Presse, 16 October 2004, Arts & Spectacles 14. 19 Daniel Lemay, ‘Pour répondre à la question de base: “Qui suis-je?”,’ La Presse, 18 May 1991, 3. 20 Liliane Lacroix, ‘Le “Téléthon” des retrouvailles fait mouche dans le public,’ La Presse, 21 May 1991, A3. 21 I am grateful to my Carleton University colleague Peter Hodgins for drawing my attention to this book. 22 Poliquin, In the Name of the Father, 80. Conclusion: Sex, Death, and Boredom 1 The identities of Lazure and Leclerc are not made explicit in the film itself,

185

Notes to page 158

as the characters are never actually named in the dialogue. The knowledge of who these two characters are comes only from the spectator’s intertextual recognition of the actors playing the priest, Gilles Pelletier, and the actress/nun, Johanne-Marie Tremblay, in Jésus de Montréal and Les Invasions barbares. However, the characters’ names do appear in the credits. 2 Amy Sharaf, ‘Arcand Dissects Fantasy,’ Metro (Film Festival issue), 14–16 September 2007, 7.

186

Selected Bibliography

Texts by Denys Arcand ‘Cinéma et sexualité.’ Parti Pris 9–11 (Summer 1964): 90–7. Duplessis. Montreal: VLB éditeur, c. 1978. Le Déclin de l’empire américain. Montreal: Boréal, 1986. Jésus de Montréal. Montreal: Boréal, 1989. Les Invasions barbares. Montreal: Boréal, 2003. Hors champ : écrits divers, 1961–2005. Montreal: Boréal, 2005. L’Âge des ténèbres. Montreal: Boréal, 2007. Denys Arcand and His Films Bachand, Denis. ‘La reception critique du Le Déclin de l’empire américain aux ÉtatsUnis.’ Québec Studies 19 (Fall 1994 / Winter 1995): 155–8. Barrette, Pierre. ‘La fin des bacchanals.’ 24 Images 115 (Summer 2003): 5. Copie Zéro 34–5 (December 1987 / March 1988). Special Issue on Denys Arcand. Coulombe, Michel. Denys Arcand, la vraie nature du cineaste. Monteal: Boréal, 1993. Dorland, Michael. ‘Denys Arcand, Renaissance Man.’ Cinema Canada 134 (October 1986): 15–19, 21. – ‘Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin de l’empire américain.’Cinema Canada 134 (October 1986): 20. Dundjerovic, Aleksander Sasha. ‘Contradictions and Paradoxes in Denys

Selected Bibliography

Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasion.’ London Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (2005/6): 3–18. Harcourt, Peter. ‘Le Déclin de l’empire américain / The Decline of the American Empire.’ In The Cinema of Canada, ed. Jerry White. 145–51. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Hays, Matthew. ‘Epidemic Amnesia: AIDS Is Curiously Forgotten in Deny [sic] Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares.’ Take One 46 (June–September 2004): 42–3. Howell, Peter. ‘A Director in His Prime: Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions barbares.’ Take One 43 (September–December 2003): 28–31. Imboden, Roberta. ‘The Barbarian Invasions.’ Film Quarterly 58 (Spring 2005): 49. Jean, Marcel. ‘Le Théâtre de la mort.’ 24 Images 115 (Summer 2003): 6. Kael, Pauline. ‘The Current Cinema.’ New Yorker, 15 December 1986, 85–7. Kemp, Philip. ‘The Last Laugh.’ Sight and Sound (March 2004): 37. La Rochelle, Réal. Denys Arcand, l’ange exterminateur. Montreal: Leméac, 2004. Loiselle, André, and Brian McIlroy, eds. Auteur/Provocateur: The Films of Denys Arcand, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. Martel, Angéline. ‘Le Déclin du patriarcat et l’impresario feministe.’ Canadian Woman Studies / Les Cahiers des femmes 8 (Spring 1987): 91–3. McCarthy, Todd. ‘Love and Human Remains.’ Variety, 20 September 1993. Nesselson, Lisa. ‘Invasion of the Barbarians (Les Invasions barbares).’ Variety, 26 May / 1 June 2003, 28. Pevere, Geoff. ‘Arcand's Glam Slam Strikes Out Looking; Stardom’s Take on Voyeurism, Celebrity Lame and Dated.’ Toronto Star, 7 September 2000, C5. Plamondon, Jean-François. ‘Le Déclin de la literature dans Les Invasions barbares de Denys Arcand.’ Colloquium, ‘Littérature et cinéma au Canada,’ University of Bologna, 12 December 2006. Privet, Georges. ‘Denys Arcand, le salut de la liberté,’ Voir 10 (November 1996): 14. Ranger, Pierre. ‘Les Invasions barbares, pour la suite du monde.’ Séquences 225 (May–June 2003): 32. Shek, Ben-Z. ‘History as a Unifying Structure in Le Déclin de l’empire américain.’ Québec Studies 9 (1989/1990): 9–15.

188

Selected Bibliography

Véronneau, Pierre. ‘Denys Arcand: A Moralist in Search of His Audience.’ In Great Canadian Film Directors, ed. George Melnyk. 67–77. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007. Canadian and Quebec Film Faucher, Jean. Rémy Girard, entretiens. Montreal: Éditions Québec Amérique, 2006. Lockerbie, Ian. ‘The Ethnic Other in Quebec Cinema.’ In Difference and Community: Canadian and European Cultural Perspective, ed. by Peter Easingwood, Konrad Gross, and Lynette Hunter. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Loiselle, André. Le Cinéma de Michel Brault, à l’image d’une nation. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. – Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Loiselle, André, and Tom McSorley, eds. Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada since Telefilm. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2006. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal and Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Pallister, Janis. The Cinema of Quebec: Masters in Their Own House. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Posner, Michael. Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1993. Weinmann, Heinz. Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois: de La petite Aurore à Jésus de Montréal. Montreal: L’Hexagone, 1990. Quebec Culture and History Caccia, Fulvio. Republic Denied: The Loss of Canada. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2002. Clift, Dominique. Le Déclin du nationalisme au Québec. Montreal: Éditions Libre Expression, 1981. Dumont, Fernand. Genèse de la société québécoise. Montreal: Boréal, 1993. Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard.

189

Selected Bibliography

Histoire du Québec Contemporain. Tome II. Le Québec depuis 1930. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal, 1989. Morin, Michel, and Claude Bertrand. Le Territoire imaginaire de la culture. LaSalle, QC: Éditions Hurtubise HMH, 1979. Poliquin, Daniel. In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000. Ricard, François. La Génération lyrique. Montreal: Boréal, 1992. General Works Bersani, Leo. AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Boldt-Irons, Leslie Anne. On Bataille: Critical Essays. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Brooks, Carellin. Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Feminity and the Text. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Cavafy, Constantine. ‘Waiting for the Barbarians.’ In The 100 Best Poems of All Time, ed. Leslie Pockell. 114–5. New York: Warner Books, 2001. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Gillian, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979; The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. by W.K. Marriott. London: Everyman’s Library, 1965. Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

190

CANADIAN CINEMA Edited by Bart Beaty and Will Straw 1 Bart Beaty. David Cronenberg’s ‘A History of Violence’ 2 André Loiselle. Denys Arcand’s ‘Le Déclin de l'empire américain’ and ‘Les Invasions barbares’