The Barbarian Invasion

Movie
German title	The Barbarian Invasion
Original title	Les invasions barbaren
Country of production	Canada , France
original language	French
Publishing year	2003
length	95 minutes
Age rating	FSK 12
Rod
Director	Denys Arcand
script	Denys Arcand
production	Daniel Louis , ; Denise Robert
music	Pierre Aviat
camera	Guy Dufaux , ; Christopher Ball , ; Nathalie Moliavko-Visotzky
cut	Isabelle Dedieu
occupation
	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; Marina Hands : Gaëlle; Toni Cecchinato : Alessandro; Mitsou Gélinas : Ghislaine; Isabelle Blais : Sylvaine; Roy Dupuis : Gilles Levac;

The Barbarian Invasions is a feature film of Canadian director Denys Arcand from the year 2003 . The tragicomedy based on a script by the director was produced by several film studios , including Canal Plus and Téléfilm Canada . Rémy Girard played the main role of a sick man who looks back on his life and says goodbye to his friends. The Barbarian Invasions, a sequel of the film The Decline of the American Empire (1986), won at the Academy Awards 2004 award in the category Best Foreign Language Film .

action

Canadian university professor Rémy is dying in an ailing hospital in Montréal . While his daughter Sylvaine is transferring a sailing ship and cruising somewhere in the Pacific , it is Sébastien's turn to help his mother take care of her sick father. The attractive young man studied mathematics and economics and had a steep career as an investment banker . He flies from London to Canada with his fiancée Gaëlle . With the help of a Canadian doctor friend who has emigrated to the United States , Sébastien finds out how bad things really are for his father. However, he strictly refuses to use his son's contacts that would give him access to better medical treatment in the United States.

Past conflicts come to light at the bedside when Rémy receives a visit from a former lover. The seriously ill man has destroyed his family through his countless bed stories; his wife Louise left him 15 years ago and raised their son and daughter alone. Rémy sees himself as the last representative of a generation connected to Western civilization, while he defines his descendants as barbarians and describes himself as sensual socialists .

With the help of his fortune it is possible for the obsessed and ambitious capitalist Sébastien, dubbed by his father as the “chief of the barbarians” , to have the sick from a hopelessly overcrowded ward and a multi-bed room one floor down in an empty, newly renovated room. There, the son rounds up his father's old friends who are traveling from Alaska , Rome and the vicinity of Montreal to say goodbye to Rémy, including two of his former mistresses, Dominique and Diane, the gay couple Claude and Alessandro and Pierre Work colleague of the seriously ill, who has meanwhile married and started a family. Sébastien even does not fail to give his father the belated satisfaction that some of his students express their condolences to him at bedside, but she has to pay her for it.

Rémy, a lover of wine, culinary delights and, above all, women, begins to reflect on his past in the time he has left to realize that despite numerous bed stories with women, he has never found the meaning of life and terrible fear from death, which he hides behind a rough shell. Professionally, the historian, who graduated from Berkeley with two Pulitzer Prize winners, has achieved nothing apart from a few scientific articles. He spent his life as a professor at a university in the Canadian province.

When the pain got out of hand, Sébastien was advised to give his father heroin , which inhibited the pain more than morphine . After his attempt to buy heroin from the Canadian police, he gets in contact with her daughter, who works as an editor in a publishing house, through Diane, one of Rémy's former mistresses . The junkie Nathalie concludes an agreement with the enterprising Sébastien: She receives heroin free of charge, but she has to regularly give the seriously ill Rémy a dose of the drug to relieve his pain. Nathalie agrees and, in a state of intoxication, soon philosophizes with the eccentric professor about God and the world. She finds out that Rémy is not so attached to his current life as to his past.

Sébastien organizes a trip to a friend's secluded holiday home by a lake for Rémy's last few days. Here the seriously ill intellectual and his friends indulge in anecdotes one last time , for example how he and his friends exhausted every current from existentialism to separatism to Maoism and screwed up a meeting with a beautiful Chinese delegate . Here Sébastien and Nathalie gradually get closer, who unceremoniously throws the businessman's annoying cell phone into the campfire. When it comes to an end, Rémy says goodbye to his friends and family in order to receive the last, fatal dose of heroin from Nathalie.

In gratitude, Sébastien grants Nathalie the right to live in Rémy's house, which is now empty after his death. In the house where Rémy indulged his love affairs with countless students, Nathalie Sébastien confesses her love by suddenly kissing him. He happily returns the kiss, but Natalie thinks about it and pushes him away. Sébastien leaves the house to catch another glimpse of Nathalie through a window shortly before he leaves. Shortly afterwards he flies back to Europe with his fiancée Gaëlle. While the plane rolls onto the runway and his fiancée hugs him and softly breathes "I love you" at him, Sébastien looks out the window and ponders Nathalie, who is remaining in Canada.

History of origin

When making The Barbarian Invasions , director Denys Arcand had no commercial or economic motives. Had he listened to his producers and distributors, a sequel would have been made a year after the successful film The Fall of the American Empire . Seventeen years later, however, around half of the moviegoers could not do much with the recurring characters - because the current moviegoers in 1986 were still too young or not born at all.

Arcand made the film at a time when his life had changed: since the fall of the American Empire , when he was 40 years old, he had made various experiences in the following 17 years. His parents and friends had died, his children had grown up and matured into a new generation with different values and goals. He wanted to make a film about it, but didn't know how to do it exactly.

After a few attempts, which he found too gloomy, the director came up with the idea of resurrecting the characters from The Fall of the American Empire two years before shooting began . He was able to fall back on the actors who had shot with him in 1986: Rémy Girard as 'Rémy', Dorothée Berryman as 'Louise', Dominique Michel as 'Dominique', Louise Portal as 'Diane', Pierre Curzi as 'Pierre' , and Yves Jacques as 'Claude'.

When choosing a title, Arcand was asked by its producers not to allude to the film's prequel . The production company had changed hands four times in the meantime and the question of rights now seemed insoluble. And since it was about the same characters - historians seeking their place in history - Arcand thought about what had happened after the fall of the Roman Empire and came up with the title The Invasion of the Barbarians . When Arcand was in the middle of working on the script, he was surprised by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks . These events confirmed the director's belief that the title was the perfect metaphor for what he wanted to say with his film.

In this film Arcand realized his own idea of the ideal death - united with friends and relatives, in a beautiful place where the characters drink a last glass of wine and smoke a joint . Like most of his films, this one, The Invasion of the Barbarians, changes from comedic elements to melodrama .

reception

Arcand tragicomedy in which he the Canadian on the edge bureaucracy in health care and destructive unions criticized, celebrated on 21 May 2003 at the International Film Festival of Cannes premiere. The film was critically acclaimed and could be measured against the successful prequel The Fall of the American Empire . It had box office success in the director's home country and grossed CAD 6.6 million there, but failed to establish itself in the US market. The Barbarian Invasion , which premiered on August 30, 2003 at the Telluride Film Festival and was released in US theaters on November 21 of the same year, played only 3 at an estimated US $ 5 million production cost. $ 5 million back in. In Germany , where it was released in theaters on November 27, 2003, the film was also unable to establish itself despite excellent reviews.

Reviews

"Double-sided tragic comedy in which, in view of the approaching death of a professor, his family comes together." (DVD & Video Report)
“17 years after the masterpiece 'The Fall of the American Empire', the Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand reassembles his heroes of the time in front of the camera - and promptly received the 2003 Oscar abroad and numerous other awards. His heroes turn out to be aging, yet extremely virile gentlemen who represent world history in miniature in the diaphragmatic and yet sadly sad family fable. A hot tip for film buffs with a sense of humor and brains. " (VideoWoche)
“'It is a most amusing pleasure to listen to the finely honed dialogues and to enjoy the sharp wit and subtle humor. When the 'For ever young' generation makes fun of itself with a slight melancholy and hackles through the 'isms' that it once followed blindly - except for 'cretinism' - then that is more than just quiet nostalgia. In Canada, the fine-grained theatrical piece broke all box office records when it launched. With us, this pleasant kind of barbarian should conquer the art house cinema in flight. ” ( Blickpunkt: Film )
"'The Invasion of the Barbarians' is the sequel to Arcand's cult" Fall of the American Empire "from 1987 - and it has become sentimental and roaring funny and deadly sad and very clever." ( Süddeutsche Zeitung )
“(…) You are all the more grateful for the sarcastic ensemble piece 'The Invasion of the Barbarians'. With the same actors with whom the Canadian director Denys Arcand celebrated the success of 'The Fall of the American Empire' in Cannes in 1986, he is now returning to the Côte d'Azur. The sequel to this film is an example of the fact that you can still grind dialogues until they are sharp as scalpels, and that you can use them to dissect the cynicism of civilization and the people who produce them. " ( The mirror )
"'The Invasion of the Barbarians' by Denys Arcand became a public favorite in Cannes!" ( Frankfurter Rundschau )
"'The Invasion of the Barbarians': an outstanding film from Arcand in Cannes!" ( Kölner Stadtanzeiger )
"The nicest surprise of the competition in Cannes 2003!" (Le Figaro)
"The film that got the most applause in Cannes!" (Studio Magazine)
"'The Invasion of the Barbarians' received the 'Palm of the Heart' of the festival participants!" (Paris Match)
“'The Barbarian Invasion': a festival of emotions!” (Le Parisien)
“A powerful, comical and wonderfully unpretentious ode to family, friendship and the meaning of life is 'The Invasion of the Barbarians', powerfully entertaining, intelligently written and deeply moving. With charmingly broken characters and a brisk pace, the film confronts the concerns of life and death with disrespectful wit and a sensitive eye. " (Variety)

Remarks

The Canadian city of Montréal was the only location for the shooting.
Director Denys Arcand has a cameo as a unionist who returns Sébastien his stolen laptop. The sign “Directeur” is emblazoned on his jacket.
The failure of communism is discussed in several dialogues in the film.

Awards

The barbarian invasion was critically acclaimed and won numerous festival and critic awards. In 2004 the film was nominated for two Oscars : while the Oscar for the best original screenplay passed to Denys Arcand and instead Sofia Coppola was honored for her film Lost in Translation , the French-Canadian co-production won in the category Best Foreign Language Film a. a. prevail against the competition from Sweden , the Czech Republic , Japan and Holland . This makes The Invasion of the Barbarians the first sequel to triumph in this category.

The work was also awarded three Césars . The film received the most important French film award in the categories of Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. The critics particularly praised the Canadian actress Marie-Josée Croze from the acting ensemble . For her role as a helpful junkie, she was u. a. Awarded the Actor Award at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2003. Awarded by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television u. a. Leading actor Rémy Girard, who, as an eccentric, terminally ill historian, cast a spell over the cinema audience.