Date: 18 April 2004 Summary: A civilised way to go
A comedy about dying is something of a challenge, but here French Canadian
writer/director Denys Arcand succeeds in amusing as well as moving his
audience. Several of the characters from his `Decline of the American
Empire' made in 1986 assemble for the last few days of one of their number,
Rémy; philosopher and ardent womanizer, who is facing death from cancer.
Initially he is lying in a crowded Montreal public hospital but his wealthy
money market trader son Sébastian soon has him established in a more
suitable suite (how this is achieved provides much amusement). Later, when
the doctors can do no more, Rémy and his friends and family (except for a
daughter on the high seas who is present by videophone) decamp to a lakeside
cabin, still talking and partying, for his final days.
Rémy and his circle are great talkers but not perhaps such deep thinkers. As
someone reminds them they have adopted at one time or other every ism except
cretinism. Putting it another way they are creatures of intellectual fashion
and their core beliefs hard to identify. Of course Rémy is afraid of dying
but he is also having trouble with the thought that his life has been a
failure (having never published his magnum opus). Fortunately his family and
friends think otherwise. Whatever Rémy has or has not achieved he has been
good at living and they the better from having known him. A man whose
ex-wife, and numerous lovers can all gather around his deathbed in amicable
fashion must radiate a certain generosity of spirit.
Religiously inclined persons will hate this film, as the deity is pointedly
ignored. In one scene, Sébastian's art-dealer girlfriend receives a call to
the vaults of a Montreal cathedral to appraise a huge accumulation of
religious art donated by parishioners. The priest showing her around this
huge pile of junk remarks that people used to come to church, but stopped
rather suddenly, in 1966. What, one wonders happened in 1966? A nun in the
nightmare hospital tries to bring the Lord to Rémy, but he is unmoved. He
does not need God to die, only his family and friends
company.
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