Eight French Canadian intellectuals discuss sex and gather for a weekend in the country in 'The Decline of the American Empire'. The 'aren't we naughty' tone is amusing at first but goes on so long that it outstays its welcome, which I think is the point. It gets tiresom and revels the shallow, unhappiness of many of the characters, the extent to which sexual excess controls them, does not satisfy in any lasting way, complicates their lives and is destructive to their own wellbeing.
There is the gay man whose promiscuousness has made him ill, the divorcee who finds escape from her children and a lackluster career in a masochistic relationship. One wife has made her peace with her husband having trists when out of town, so long as he behaves locally, not knowing he has slept with two of the other women at the party. Perhaps sadist of all is the middle aged man who may have finally found the love of his life, but doesn't trust it and self sabatoges.
Denys Arcand likes to explore both the comic and the tragic in his subject matter, the bittersweet. Be that sex and academia in 'Decline', the Canadian public health system and strained father son relationships in 'The Barbarin Invassions' (2003), or the contemporary theater and the nature of the divine in 'Jesus of Montreal' (1989). I had seen these films so far apart from each other, I'm only now realizing they are part of an extended universe, with characters overlapping in venn diagram manner; with for example the cheating husband here being the dieing old man in 'Barbarians'.
A major theme of all his work is the center not holding, a civilization in decline due to its selfishness. There is tragic truth writ both large and small throughout. There is a subtlety of construction in which things already set up, leap out at you in the end. I was shocked how a film I was losing patience with tuned this around and bowled me over. ****
No comments:
Post a Comment