Les invasions barbares (2003)
Actors:
Dorothée Berryman (actress),
Denys Arcand (director),
Daniel Louis (producer),
Denys Arcand (writer),
Julie Christie (actress),
Micheline Lanctôt (actress),
Rémy Girard (actor),
Denys Arcand (actor),
Denise Robert (producer),
Pierre Curzi (actor),
Roy Dupuis (actor),
Yves Jacques (actor),
Gaston Lepage (actor),
Louise Portal (actress),
Macha Grenon (actress),
Plot: In this belated sequel to 'The Decline of the American Empire', 50-something Montreal college professor, Remy, learns that he is dying of liver cancer. He decides to make amends meet to his friends and family before he dies. He first tries to made peace with his ex-wife Louise, who asks their estranged son Sebastian, a successful businessman living in London, to come home. Sebastian makes the impossible happen, using his contacts and disrupting the entire Canadian system in every way possible to help his father fight his terminal illness to the bitter end, while he also tries to reunite his former friends, Pierre, Alain, Dominique, Diane, and Claude to see their old friend before he passes on.
Keywords: absent-father, actor-shares-first-name-with-character, adultery, airplane, airport, alaska, albanian, ambulance, american, american-flag
Genres:
Comedy,
Crime,
Drama,
Mystery,
Romance,
Taglines: A provocative new comedy about sex, friendship, and all other things that invade our lives.
Quotes:
Hospital Patient Assistant: [speaking English] Good morning, guys. Welcome to America.::Rémy: [in English; sarcastic] Praise the Lord.::Sébastien: [also sarcastic] Hallelujah.
Rémy: I wish that one day you will have a son like you.
Rémy: [in French] Contrary to belief, the 20th century wasn't that bloody. It's agreed that wars caused 100 million deaths. Add 10 million for the Russian gulags. The Chinese camps, we'll never know, but say 20 million. So 130, 145 million dead. Not all that impressive. In the 16th century, the Spanish and Portuguese managed, without gas chambers or bombs, to slaughter 150 million Indians in Latin America. With axes! That's a lot of work, sister. Even if they had church support, it was an achievement. So much so tha the Dutch, English, French, and later Americans followed their lead and butchered another 50 million. 200 million dead in all! The greatest massacre in history took place right here. And not the tiniest holocaust museum. The history of mankind is a history of horrors.
Rémy: We've been everything: separatists, supporters of independantists, sovereignists, sovereignity-associanists...::Pierre: At first, we were existentialists.::Dominique: We read Sartre and Camus.::Claude: Then Fanon, we became anti-colonialists.::Rémy: We read Marcuse and became Marxists.::Pierre: Marxist-Leninists.::Alessandro: Trotskyists.::Diane: Maoists.::Rémy: After Solzhenitsyn we changed, we became structuralists.::Pierre: Situationists.::Dominique: Feminists.::Claude: Deconstructionists.::Pierre: Is there an -ism we haven't worshipped?::Claude: Cretinism.
Nathalie: It's not the present you cling on, it's your past life. That life is already dead.::Rémy: Perhaps.