Alexandre Landry as Pierre-Paul, left, and Rémy Girard as Sylvain 'The Brain' Bigras.Courtesy of Entertainment One
- The Fall of the American Empire
- Written and directed by: Denys Arcand
- Starring: Alexandre Landry, Rémy Girard and Maripier Morin
- Classification NA; 127 minutes
Denys Arcand’s latest film begins promisingly in a cheap Montreal restaurant where a depressive philosophy PhD explains to his girlfriend that only stupid people can be happy. As he tactlessly theorizes, her imploding face registers her disillusion with their future. It’s a darkly amusing opening that is classic Arcand; yet two hours later, The Fall of the American Empire ends listlessly with an earnest montage of the city’s homeless Inuit. Somewhere along the way, the masterful Quebec satirist has lost his bearings.
Since the title of this film invites the comparison, it’s worth remembering the impact of Arcand’s talky sex satire The Decline of the American Empire all the way back in 1986. Received with a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes, it burst out of the Quebec market, sweeping through English-Canada and Europe before garnering a foreign-language nomination at the Oscars. Today, the film might seem pretentious in its insistence on dialogue over plot or even incident, a bit fusty in its focus on heterosexual couples and a bit naive, considering contemporary politics, in its suggestion that something as inward-looking as hedonism was the epitome of decline. But it spoke to its own social moment, and did so with a wit and an honesty that entranced the audiences of its day.
In theory, Arcand has completed the loose trilogy that ensued – the Oscar-winning Barbarian Invasions (2003), in which the same characters confronted their mortality, and the Walter-Mitty-like tale Days of Darkness (2007). Still, the supposedly dystopian story of the latter was poorly reviewed and, since it takes money as its theme in place of sex or death, this new film might also be considered a thematic sequel to its 1986 predecessor.
Carla McDuff (Maxim Roy), left, and Aspasie (Maripier Morin).Courtesy of Entertainment One
It offers, first and foremost, a more or less amusing crime caper enlivened by the juxtaposition of improbable characters. The shy, awkward but deeply moral Pierre-Paul (Alexandre Landry), a philosophy grad forced to drive a delivery truck, stumbles across an armed robbery and escapes with two bags of hot money. He soon enlists an ex-con who has been studying money laundering to help him hold on to his ill-gotten gains: Arcand favourite Rémy Girard puts in an amusing turn as Sylvain “The Brain” Bigras, an aging biker who can cite for Pierre-Paul every stupid move the neophyte has made so far. One of those was immediately renting the services of Aspasie (Maripier Morin), the highest-paid escort in Montreal, so the police are already suspicious.
Finding Aspasie both sexually and emotionally irresistible, Pierre-Paul takes her into his confidence and she becomes drawn into his scheme – not for the money, but for Pierre-Paul himself. Yes, the hooker has a heart of gold. This core trio of performances are smooth and amusing, but Arcand does not avoid painful stereotypes of the underworld in a plot that relies too heavily on black gangsters and a tough female cop straight out of the more formulaic moments of prime time.
Aspasie is the highest-paid escort in Montreal.Courtesy of Entertainment One
There are many amusing passages in the film as the laundering scheme unfolds: Aspasie’s former lover, a high-flying Montreal lawyer (Pierre Curzi) phones accommodating bankers across the globe; a lineup of small-business people make their pitches to Pierre-Paul to participate in some tax evasion. But these are comic sequences rather than dramatic scenes and they don’t help an unevenly paced piece that fails to raise a head of steam on the crime story. Meanwhile, as these sympathetic criminals try to outwit police and keep the cash, the social themes remain unfocused. Pierre-Paul uses the money to help a homeless shelter, but also tries to work a scam to pay himself and his buddies, so the film’s moral remains a bit vague.
Arcand exposes the obscene practices of the 1 per cent while observing poverty, yet, like Pierre-Paul, he seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, preaching about social justice while hanging on to the dough – or, in the filmmaker’s case, the laughs. Neither wicked enough in its satire nor engaging enough in its action, Fall seems to signal decline.
The Fall of the American Empire opens May 31.
Kate Taylor