Canadian Film Review: An Eye for Beauty (2014)

* *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Eric Bruneau, Melanie Mercosky, Melanie Thierry, Marie-Josée Croze

Beautiful people doing ugly things in beautiful locations. An Eye for Beauty, the latest from Canadian master Denys Arcand, will give you a serious case of house envy, but inspires little beyond that. A listless drama about the emotional destruction wrought by an affair, Arcand reunites with actress Marie-Josée Croze for the first time since 2003's The Barbarian Invasions, for which she won Best Actress and he Best Screenplay at Cannes, and then gives her nearly nothing to do, which is a particular shame since she's always the most interesting person on screen whenever she appears. A rare misstep for Arcand, An Eye for Beauty is as emotionally empty as it is gorgeously photographed.

Canadian Film Review: The Decline of the American Empire (1986)

* * *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Remy Girard, Dorothee Barryman, Louise Portal, Pierre Curzi, Yves Jacques, Dominique Michel, Daniel Briere, Genevieve Rioux

The characters in Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire spend a lot of time talking. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen an Arcand film, particularly The Barbarian Invasions, which is a sequel to this one. For the characters in this film - all of whom are university professors or the romantic partners of university professors - the best thing about doing something is being able to talk about it afterwards. Fortunately, they're all good talkers.

The film begins with a group of men gathered at a house by a lake and a group of women at a spa. Both groups talk relentlessly about sex and you get the sense that what each individual has done/experienced is far less important than their ability to verbally one-up everyone else as they extol witticisms and bons mots at every turn. The men are Remy (Remy Girard), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Claude (Yves Jacques) and Allain (Daniel Briere). The women are Louise (Dorothee Barryman), Dominique (Dominique Michel), Diane (Louise Portal), and Danielle (Genevieve Rioux). When the two groups finally come together at the lake house, they look almost like two rival gangs about to face off. However, as the story takes its turns, we realize that alliances have been formed less according to gender and more according to intellectual status.

Louise is Remy's wife. Unlike the other members of the group she is not an "intellectual," per say, and there is a certain degree to which it seems like everyone else is humoring her. The way that they react to her is ultimately not that different from the way they react to Diane's brutish lover Mario (Gabriel Arcand), which is to say with polite indifference. Things come to a head when Louise offers an opinion on an interview that Dominique has done with Diane and Dominique casually reveals that she's slept with Remy. Later Dominique confesses to Allain that she wanted to hurt Louise, though she can't really justify why. Louise, though likeable and firmly enconsed in the group thanks to her long marriage to Remy, is still something of an intruder, an honorary but not a real member of the club.

The heart of the film is, I think, in the scenes between Remy and Louise after she realizes that she's been deluding herself. In the earliest scenes Remy happily recounts stories of his affairs to the guys, while Louise naively discusses her marriage with Dominique and Diane - both of whom have had affairs with Remy. It is telling that in the moment when Remy absolutely should speak - Louise, in fact, begs him to - he finds that he cannot. He would rather do anything than talk at that moment because this is not the kind of talking he likes to do. The characters, for the most part, seem to have intellectualized sex to a point where the act itself is isolated in time and space and unconnected to the relationships and people around them. To be confronted with someone like Louise, who believes that things matter and have consequences, is something that Remy just can't handle.

It would be easy to write The Decline of the American Empire off as a Big Chill style movie, but it manages to be more than just the tropes that it uses as its jumping off points. The characters are distinct and interesting and their conversations are entertaining. The script is tight, revealing the characters' personalities and the nuances of their relationships with each other in small doses that allow the story to bloom before us. I think that The Barbarian Invasions is the better of the two films, but both offer rich character studies that are only deepened when viewed together.

Canadian Film Review: Jesus of Montreal (1989)

* * * *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Lothaire Bluteau

Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal is a thoughtful and well-constructed film which attempts to examine the relationship between people and religion, between ideas and practice. In it a passion play is staged which adheres perhaps too closely to Jesus’ teachings, starring an actor whose life begins to parallel that of the character he’s playing. It’s a film that takes religious teachings very seriously but casts a critical eye at the politics of organized religion.

Daniel (Lothaire Bluteau) is an actor much admired by other actors but whose career has never taken off due to the years that he’s spent abroad. A Montreal church, recognizing that the passion play that they stage every year has become stale, hires Daniel to direct and star in a retooled version. To do this, he gathers four other struggling actors to help him: Martin (Remy Girard) and Rene (Robert Lepage), actors he finds doing voice-over work, one for a porn film and the other for an educational film; Mireill (Catherine Wilkening), an actress more appreciated for her looks than her abilities, and Constance (Johanne-Marie Tremblay), a veteran of the passion play whom Daniel learns has been carrying on an affair with the Father Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier).

The play that the troupe puts on is not the play that the church is expecting, leading Father Leclerc to attempt to shut it down. It’s too literal, it’s too radical, and the response it provokes from the audience is too impassioned. There are members of the audience who speak to Daniel as if he really is Jesus and he himself begins to exude a different aura as events in his life begin to echo biblical stories about Jesus. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the movie is that it doesn’t hit you over the head with the parallels that it’s making. Arcand obviously has a firm handle on the subject, but he never lets the material become overbearing. There is an ease with which the film puts Daniel through the paces so that it doesn’t seem contrived or forced.

Existing on the periphery of the story, orbiting around Daniel like distant satellites, are characters whose purpose is neither to follow nor to impede him, but to distort his legacy. One is a member of the media who records and shares whatever facts or rumours about Daniel will make for the best story. The other is an attorney who takes the role of Satan to Daniel’s Jesus and sees a way to use Daniel’s memory to pervert his message and make a profit. These two characters, along with the church leaders who want to shut down the play, are like shadows steadily crowding in on Daniel, obscuring the light he is trying to impart.

Anchoring the film is the quiet central performance by Blutheau. He plays Daniel with a great deal of subtlety and grace, the full scope of which didn’t even really hit me until days after I’d watched the movie. The direction by Arcand is equally assured and engaging, though I do have one qualm: the music in the film dates it ridiculously. I mean, nothing says 1980s like a soulful electric guitar solo segue from one scene to another. Other than that, though, it’s a great film from top to bottom.

Canadian Film Review: Days of Darkness (2007)

* * * *
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Marc Lebreche, Diane Kruger

It would be easy to call Days of Darkness an American Beauty retread, as Denys Arcand’s film centers on an unhappy suburbanite who is disrespected by his children and married to a woman (a realtor, no less) who has no interest in him sexually or otherwise, and who has a terrifically active fantasy life which threatens to usurp his real life in importance. The comparisons come easily and criticism based on those comparisons are, to an extent, valid. However, to dismiss the film so easily would mean missing the absolute charm of this very intelligent and very funny film.

Jean-Marc (Marc Labreche) is a middle-aged civil servant who hates his job, is unhappily married and ignored by his two daughters, helpless in the face of his mother’s terminal illness, and spends most of his day escaping into fantasies, most of which involve a revolving cast of women in various states of undress. However, his fantasies aren’t solely about scantily clad women who find him irresistible; he also fantasizes about becoming somebody, writing a book or being elected into office – anything different from his actual job. Jean-Marc uses his fantasies just to get through his days, but soon these aren’t enough: His wife (Sylvie Leonard) leaves him to run off with her boss to Toronto, his mother dies, he walks out of his job and crashes his car. It’s time for him to make a change, to start living life outside his head, and set himself on a path towards happiness.

The world in which Jean-Marc lives is like our own but slightly exaggerated, making for situations and problems which can seem both far fetched and frighteningly feasible at the same time. He works for the government, sitting behind a desk as various people come to him seeking help for problems that he has no ability to solve. One man lost his legs when a street lamp fell on him and now the government expects him to pay half the cost of putting up a new one. A woman’s husband is taken away by the police, suspected of being a terrorist simply because he’s Arab. There’s nothing Jean-Marc can do; his best suggestion is that she try to become friends with a celebrity and thereby bring enough publicity to the situation to embarrass the government into letting her husband go. Despite the fact that no one is ever actually helped by the ministry, there’s always a long line-up downstairs, one which often becomes unmovable due to the fact that the employees are constantly being taken away from their work to attend meetings to boost morale or find ways to achieve greater harmony between yin and yang in the office set-up.

There are a lot of really great sequences in the film, but I think my favourite involves Jean-Marc’s attempt at speed dating. After meeting with several women who dismiss him immediately for various reasons including the fact that he’s had a vasectomy, doesn’t work out, and drives a Hyundai, he finally meets a woman who has as rich a fantasy life as his own (two words: medieval festival). However, she turns out to be a little too into her fantasy world, reaffirming for him that a little bit of reality can go a long way.

The central performance by Labreche is engaging and, to various degrees, relatable and there are fine supporting performances by the actresses playing the myriad women in his life, including Diane Kruger, who appears as his go-to fantasy woman. Comparisons to American Beauty are inescapable but, for me, this is the more resonant film. I've always been a little put off by the casual misogyny of Sam Mendes' film, while this one is self-aware enough to be able to diffuse those "iffy" elements by consigning them to the realm of fantasy and making it clear that these fantasies, rather than empowering Jean-Marc, simply act as crutches and hold him back.

Canadian Film Review: The Barbarian Invasions (2003)

Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze

The Barbarian Invasions is a film so delightful and charming that you forgive it for the clichés on which its story hangs. There are a lot of things about the film you’ve probably seen before: a group of old friends reuniting and both celebrating and lamenting the way their lives have changed; the libertarian father and his distant, conservative son who is determined to be nothing like him; the Casanova whose former lovers come together, in this case to give him a proper send off. But, these familiar elements are perhaps a credit, rather than a debit to the film. We feel instantly comfortable in this world, as if we know these people – and that’s how the film gets to you.

The film begins with Rémy (Girard), a college professor on his deathbed. We are made immediately to understand that he’s had a… colourful love life as we watch his latest lover berate him for his history of infidelity. Rémy knows he doesn’t have much time left and doesn’t bother much in the way of an apology. He knows who he is and what he’s done, and he’s made peace with it even if she hasn’t. As the film progresses, his ex-wife, two of his former lovers and a couple of his lifelong friends will join him to spend his final days in reminiscence. Also on hand, albeit reluctantly, is his son Sébastian (Rousseau). Sébastian, who has always resented Rémy’s laisser-faire attitude towards relationships is determined to be different from his father, is determined, in fact, to have nothing to do with his father until some intervention on the part of his mother. Sébastian is shocked when he arrives at the hospital and the film is, at least in part, a condemnation of the Canadian health care system, which is presented here as overburdened and unorganized.

Sébastian goes about trying to make Rémy more comfortable, first by bribing someone at the hospital so that he can move Rémy to a floor that has been left entirely vacant after renovations, and then by bribing some of Rémy’s students into visiting him, making him believe that he’s made an impact on their lives. Sébastian does these things less out of love for his father than out of a need to do something, anything, to control this situation which leaves him feeling so powerless. He further takes control by bypassing traditional medicine, which has lost its effect on Rémy, to find something to ease his pain. A nurse suggests heroin, which Sébastian procures through Nathalie (Croze), the daughter of Rémy’s friend/ex-lover. Croze is wonderful as Nathalie, warning Sébastian from the outset that he shouldn’t trust a heroin addict to be reliable (a point she later proves) and later shooting up with Rémy.

This is a very conversational film, which is part of its charm because these people are so good at talking. They talk about art and politics, about love and sex, and they do so in such a way that you believe that these people have been drifting in and out of each other’s lives for decades. There are stories told in the film that seem to have nothing to do with the narrative – one friend tells of a meeting with an ex-girlfriend, Rémy tells a story about visiting China and attempting to flirt with a beautiful woman by praising the Communist government, only to discover that that system has led to much suffering on her part – but which nevertheless fit so well with the film as a whole. This is a film that not only acknowledges that its characters have thoughts and ideas and read books, but pauses to listen to them talk these things out.

The performances in the film are excellent across the board, especially those of Girard, as the dying man coming to terms with a life lived to its fullest, and Croze, as the damaged woman hurtling towards her own destructive end. The film ends on a note that is ambiguous, but also perhaps appropriate. There’s been some suggestion that Nathalie’s troubles are rooted in part by the hedonistic lifestyle that was enjoyed by her mother (and Rémy, and the others like them) when she was growing up. The film ends with her and Sébastian sharing a moment that you begin anticipating as soon as they meet. To get involved might destroy Sébastian (or, at least, his image of himself), but it might be Nathalie’s salvation. Life can be messy that way, and we don’t know for sure what will develop from this brief encounter. But to end on that note, with this loose end left untied, is the best way for a film like this to conclude because it suggests that life carries on, which is what The Barbarian Invasions has been trying to convey to us from the very beginning.