Director: Denys Arcand
Year Released: 2003
Rating: 3.0
Sad follow-up to The Decline of the American Empire in which one of the characters, a lecherous professor, has cancer and his son and old friends have come to see him through his final days. As a trenchant commentary on not just the Canadian health care system (inefficient) but also drugs (the man's son has to buy heroin to help his father with the pain) and the invasion of abstract 'barbarians' (capitalists, terrorists) it's a fine conversation piece, only slipping in the last half hour when it turns up the sentimentality. I wrote back in the early nineties that Decline was "the best Eric Rohmer film Eric Rohmer never made" and while this sequel strays a little from that picture's chatty, relatively upbeat nature, it's a genuine delight to see these idiosyncratic and contradictory (for being so anti-capitalist they don't appear to be suffering severe monetary hardships or ceased their globetrotting and truffle-eating ways) characters back again.
