Since I haven't seen the movie to which this is a sequel, I can only comment on the movie itself. I liked it quite a lot. I didn't think it was so much about death or a reconciliation, as it was about how eras and attitudes are succeeded by others. The world of which the dying professor and his friends are a part is one that I relate to as a one-time participant. Now, it exists only in pockets, while all around the pockets seethes its turbulent successors--the old system crumbles and something unnerving is slouching toward Bethlehem. The "barbarians" seem disturbing and depressing to the those who look glumly at them from the perspective of the old days and values to which the last survivors cling. It didn't seem to me that Arcand regarded the relics of the Old Way as necessarily admirable or exemplary. But they're representatives of that bygone time of restlessness, of passionate rejection of one "ism" and equally passionate embrace of the next--of a rather dutiful celebration of liberation from sexual repression, and of belief in a certain culture that is increasingly neither studied nor respected. Viewed in that way, the film does a nice job of being evocative. I don't think it means to indict the Canadian medical system, or exalt intellectualism as represented by the old set here at the expense of a new lowbrow world view. But maybe that's just me.
Review of The Barbarian Invasions
