E-Mail This Article to a Friend Death trip Denys Arcand’s Les invasions barbares lays an old friend to rest BY BROOKE HOLGERSON

Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand insists, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, that he’s not a cynic. In his new Les invasions barbares/The Barbarian Invasions, a follow-up to 1986’s Oscar-nominated (for Best Foreign Film) Le déclin de l’empire américain/The Decline of the American Empire, a man on his deathbed comes to terms with a life spent in meaningless flings, the result of which is a destroyed marriage and resentful children. For good measure, Arcand throws in a running commentary on the Canadian health-care system, the influx of illegal drugs, and the ineffectuality of the Catholic Church.

Still, he maintains he’s a realist. "As probably all cynics do. Because you’re just saying, ‘Things work this way.’ And people don’t want to believe it. They say, ‘No, it’s not true, my marriage will last forever.’ Well, you know, one out of every two marriages — it’s even more than that — 75 percent of marriages are ending up in divorce, so you have a 75 percent chance of being divorced at some point, and people say, ‘Oh, you’re such a cynic.’ I’m quoting statistics. Is that being cynical — quoting the census bureau?"

Les invasions barbares might almost convince you. In spite of the film’s depiction of corrupt, decaying institutions, individual decency almost always wins out. Rémy (Rémy Girard reprising his Déclin role) is now dying of cancer, and he reunites with his estranged son, Sébastien (played with understated gravity by the stand-up comedian Stéphane Rousseau). The polar opposite of his free-loving Socialist intellectual father, Sébastien begins paying off everyone from union officials to hospital administrators in order to make his dad more comfortable, eventually buying heroin from the daughter of one of Rémy’s ex-mistresses to ease his pain. "This is the son that you want to have," Arcand argues. "He’s the most perfect son, except to his father. He’s never read a book, and he doesn’t know what ideologies are, stuff like that. He’s stuck on his computer and his cell phone and his video games. Those are the three elements that keep him alive, which is infuriating for his father, but at the same time, he needs his son desperately."

Sébastien also reunites Rémy with his old buddies, the cast of Déclin, who talk incessantly about politics and sex and are only slightly less self-absorbed than they were in the earlier film. "I wanted a bunch of people who would want to smoke a last joint before going away around a campfire, talking about the days when they all slept together and stuff like that. When you’re talking about someone who’s sick, usually it’s very depressing, and I thought, ‘That’s not somewhere I’d like to go.’ So at some point I thought, ‘What if I go back to these characters: they’re funny, they laugh all the time, so maybe this time I could do this story without it being depressing.’ "

It’s Arcand’s preoccupation with larger questions that raises the film above the tearjerker level. As Rémy struggles to come to terms with his life and his place in the world before he leaves it, he questions not only his past but our collective past and its violence, its politics, religion, and love. "He’s been a bad father, a bad husband, a bad teacher — the worst kind of person," Arcand admits. "But in the end, you have to forgive him, like you have to forgive everybody in the end."

Les invasions barbares opens next Friday at the Kendall Square and other theaters to be announced.