Mark Steyn: The Barbarian Invasions (Reviewing a movie about Canadian health care)

It’s the best part of two decades since Denys Arcand gave us The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire, a very Quebecois gloss on The Big Chill about a group of boozy, bed-hopping, bantering boomers connected one way or another to a university history department. They were in their prime, though they did not fully realize it. Eighteen years on, one of their number is now facing the biggest chill: death.

In his mid-50s, Remy (Remy Girard), a self-described “sensual socialist”, is perforce heavy on the latter and lighter than he’d wish on the former. He’s no longer banging co-eds, though the hairless head makes him look randier than ever. He has cancer, and, worse than that, he has it in Quebec. British audiences, disheartened by the state of the NHS, may find it oddly comforting to discover a G7 nation whose health care system rivals the crappiness of the United Kingdom’s. As the film opens, Arcand’s camera weaves its way to Remy’s bed through a maze of corridors clogged with patients lying on gurneys hooked up to tubes snaking their way back to wherever the overflow started. In the course of the film, no doctor ever addresses Remy by his correct name.

His son, Sebastien, is rich and successful and living in London, doing something crass and vulgar with markets that Remy has never troubled himself to enquire about. He and his son are separated by more than the Atlantic. But, at the behest of his mother (and the philandering Remy’s ex-), Sebastien flies back, is horrified at the conditions his father is being treated in, and contacts an old friend, now a doctor. Like most Quebecois doctors, he’s now working in America, at a hospital in Baltimore that could help with the diagnosis if the chaps in Montreal were able to e-mail them a scan. Unfortunately, the only machine in the province that can do the scan is 90 minutes away in Sherbrooke and there’s a six-to-twelve month waiting list, by which time they’ll have to dig Remy up to do it. Or he can have it done tomorrow, if he drives an hour south to Burlington, Vermont and pays $2,000. Unlike Britain but like North Korea, in Her Majesty’s northern Dominion the public health system is such an article of faith that no private hospitals are permitted: Canada’s private health care system is called “America”. So Sebastien pays for a trip to Vermont.

He wants his dad to go to Baltimore for treatment, but Remy roars that he’s the generation that fought passionately for socialized health care and he’s gonna stick with it even if it kills him. …

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THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS

Nominations: Best Writing (Original Screenplay); Best Foreign Language Film

It’s the best part of two decades since Denys Arcand gave us The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire, a very Quebecois gloss on The Big Chill about a group of boozy, bed-hopping, bantering boomers connected one way or another to a university history department. They were in their prime, though they did not fully realize it. Eighteen years on, one of their number is now facing the biggest chill: death.

In his mid-50s, Remy (Remy Girard), a self-described “sensual socialist”, is perforce heavy on the latter and lighter than he’d wish on the former. He’s no longer banging co-eds, though the hairless head makes him look randier than ever. He has cancer, and, worse than that, he has it in Quebec. British audiences, disheartened by the state of the NHS, may find it oddly comforting to discover a G7 nation whose health care system rivals the crappiness of the United Kingdom’s. As the film opens, Arcand’s camera weaves its way to Remy’s bed through a maze of corridors clogged with patients lying on gurneys hooked up to tubes snaking their way back to wherever the overflow started. In the course of the film, no doctor ever addresses Remy by his correct name.

His son, Sebastien, is rich and successful and living in London, doing something crass and vulgar with markets that Remy has never troubled himself to enquire about. He and his son are separated by more than the Atlantic. But, at the behest of his mother (and the philandering Remy’s ex-), Sebastien flies back, is horrified at the conditions his father is being treated in, and contacts an old friend, now a doctor. Like most Quebecois doctors, he’s now working in America, at a hospital in Baltimore that could help with the diagnosis if the chaps in Montreal were able to e-mail them a scan. Unfortunately, the only machine in the province that can do the scan is 90 minutes away in Sherbrooke and there’s a six-to-twelve month waiting list, by which time they’ll have to dig Remy up to do it. Or he can have it done tomorrow, if he drives an hour south to Burlington, Vermont and pays $2,000. Unlike Britain but like North Korea, in Her Majesty’s northern Dominion the public health system is such an article of faith that no private hospitals are permitted: Canada’s private health care system is called “America”. So Sebastien pays for a trip to Vermont.

He wants his dad to go to Baltimore for treatment, but Remy roars that he’s the generation that fought passionately for socialized health care and he’s gonna stick with it even if it kills him. So the cocky London dealer goes to work. He blags his way into the admin, and into the plush, pot-planted office of the head lady. He’s noticed that, for some reason, the second floor is entirely empty, and he’d like his dad to have a room there. The lady explains that prioritizing individual needs is not consistent with “the Ministry’s ambulatory thrust”. So he bribes her, and he bribes the union, and he bribes everyone else he needs to until he gets his father a freshly-painted room on the abandoned floor. “You must be a friend of the Premier or a big hockey star,” says the nurse to Remy.

And then Sebastien invites the old gang back – his dad’s buddies and mistresses - to fill the room with good cheer, reminiscences of great blowjobs, and meditations on the state of the world. He even bribes some of Remy’s former students, indifferent to his fate, to come and visit him in hospital and pretend they care.

Denys Arcand is a leftie, as almost all French Canadians are, but he’s a leftie realist. I saw Les Invasions Barbares with a hometown crowd in Montreal and the biggest laugh went to a predictable George Bush sneer late in the picture. That must have been small comfort after 90 minutes of a rueful requiem for boomer assumptions. Arcand’s film is an elegiac comedy, a difficult trick to pull off – there’s jokes, but the music is formal (Handel and suchlike). Remy and his pals were clever and witty and well-read, fiercely anti-clerical and, as they concede, subscribers to all the fashionable “isms”. Yet, in Quebec as elsewhere, the “isms” decayed in practice into an incompetent suffocating bureaucracy. Arcand’s title refers to 9/11, from a telly intellectual’s analysis of the event. But it also describes what Sebastien does when he returns from London. He is a barbarian (“If only he would read a book. Just one!” rages Remy) but his barbarianism – the hundred-dollar bills he spreads around – gives his father his old life back.

Like the concern of his students, it’s an illusion. But, consciously or not, Arcand makes the point very literally that the ability of the intellectual class to sit around making condescending cracks about capitalism depends on the likes of capitalists like Sebastien. Remy is emblematic of a certain type you find in the salons of the west: better, smarter, funnier than those unsophisticated Yanks, but ultimately a bystander in his own fate. For a man who’s spent four decades rogering anything that moves, the “sensual socialist” is in the end impotent. There is a crudeness to some of the visual shorthand for Sebastien – the cellphone and the discarding thereof is too tritely familiar an emblem for the heartless yuppie coming to terms with what really matters. But, conversely, the hyperliterate conversation of Remy and his friends seems at times like an excuse to avoid doing anything with oneself. A man who has “lived life to the full” worries about how little he’s done.

This father/son picture is so much shrewder and thus more moving than the recent Big Fish. The performances are marvelous – Remy Girard is always reliable but Stephane Rousseau (Sebastien) is someone I knew mainly as a stand-up comic. The women – the ex-wife (Dorothee Berryman), the mistresses (Louise Portal, Dominique Michel) and a sad-eyed junkie (Marie-Josee Croze) – are eloquent testimony to Quebec’s most vital asset. I take issue with the film only in respect of Arcand’s perplexing decision to show Remy and Sebastien going from Montreal to Burlington via the border post at Derby Line rather than Highgate Springs. This detail may not be so worrisome to British moviegoers.
The Spectator, February 21st 2004

Prediction: It deserves to win Best Foreign Language Film, and it will. But M Arcand will lose the Original Screenplay Oscar to Lost In Translation.

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