Word: barbarians
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Very much reminiscent of The Big Chill, The Barbarian Invasion is a story of the lives and ideals of a group of friends looked upon in retrospect. Lauded in Canada, where it was produced, as the best film of the year, the film tells a wonderful story about love, sex and aging. Set in Montréal, the film recounts the final days in the life of Rémy, a dying French-Canadian Bohemian and historian...
Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, a multiple prizewinner at Cannes, is a comic valentine about a dying man too incorrigibly full of life to give it up. Remy was also a sexual obsessive. This is supposed to make him an endearing character, deserving of reconciliation with his family and all those who were amused or abused by his goatish charm. Old friends appear; old enemies turn wildly generous; unexpected epiphanies are sprinkled on Remy like the holy water in last rites. Indeed, the movie's plot essentially stretches out the last few minutes of It's a Wonderful Life...
...pressing through onto the Xth Legion in Dacia. Many legionaries died in a battle on the Danube, although, thankfully, the standards were not lost. We should perhaps consider whether Dacia is defendable, and what exactly we gain there when some of our finest soldiers are penned down in that barbarian Hades. After all, we have other, more pressing, needs to consider, in the forests of Germania, and the deserts of Parthia. Who, in the Senate, will approach the emperor on this, and say—Ad venatum vadamus. Stercorem pro cerebro habes, sed denarius hic sistit...
...actor-director Jiang Wen, deemed only four films worthy of prizes?the lowest number in memory. They also went out of their way to reward movies that were moderate in tone (except for Elephant): the winners included a genial comedy-drama about a dying professor (French Canada's The Barbarian Invasions), a minimalist study of two cousins getting on each other's nerves (the Turkish Uzak), and the one Asian awardee, At Five in the Afternoon, set in Afghanistan and directed by 23-year-old Iranian Samira Makhmalbaf...
...tone of apocalyptic despair. Brazilian director Hector Babenco ended his Carandiru with the slaughter of innocents in a São Paulo jail. Austrian Michael Haneke depicted the moral chaos attending an unspecified disaster in his testy The Time of the Wolf. Even Denys Arcand's genial The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian billet-doux to a dear, dying scoundrel, featured a jarring clip of a hijacked plane crashing into the World Trade Center. And the two main Palme d'Or contenders showed how the world could end in America: with a bang. Dogville - like Von Trier's best-known...