Fifty Shades of Quebecois, Part II

Film: Les Invasions Barbares (The Barbarian Invasions)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I didn’t like Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire much. It established a huge number of relationships that ultimately had an extremely convoluted path. It wasn’t that specifically, but the fact that 90% of the film was sex. People talked about sex and their past conquests like people talk about their high school athletic careers. My original plan was to watch it and its sequel on the same day. That then became maybe the same week, or the same month. And here we are, a bit more than two months later and I’m finally coming around to watching Les Invasions Barbares (The Barbarian Invasions).

It cannot be said that this film picks up where the previous left off, given the 17 years between them. Remy (Remy Girard), one of our handful of randy intellectuals from the first film, is dying. I assume it’s some sort of cancer, although I don’t remember anyone being very specific about what was going on with Remy’s internal bits. He’s now divorced and otherwise alone in the world. His ex-wife Louise (Dorothee Berryman) contacts their son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau), a London banker, to return home to be at his father’s side.

Fifty Shades of Quebecois, Part I

Film: Declin de l’Empire Americaine (The Decline of the American Empire)
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

Oh, this is going to be interesting, at least initially. Here’s a film that has everything going against it in terms of what I normally look for in a film. Decline de l’Empire Americaine (The Decline of the American Empire) is a film almost exclusively about the sex lives of a group of really, really awful people. I mean that pretty much literally. There are parts of the film that deal in brief with other topics, but it always, always comes back to sex. It’s all these people talk about. Only in film do people obsess this much about their own genitalia.

Almost the entire first hour of the film splits between two groups of people in two different places. A group of four men, three of them teachers at a university and one evidently working on his degree, are making a meal. While they make this meal, two of them in particular talk about their wide variety of sexual escapades and conquests, the multiple times they have cheated on their spouses (although one is evidently divorced), and how nearly constant sex is a necessary thing for them. A third is evidently gay, and talks about his less-than-constant but still overwhelming need for sexual conquest, claiming that he lives alone specifically so he can bring sex partners home whenever he wishes. The only one who doesn't live with his dick outside his pants is the grad student.