by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

Les Invasions barbares, Denys Arcand's sequel to his 1986 Oscar-nominated Le Déclin de l'empire américain is easily the most anticipated Québécois film of the year. One-upping last year's Séraphin: Un homme et son péché, Arcand's feature is opening on well over 100 screens in Quebec.

The two films, however, couldn't be further apart. Arcand's new film is an eloquent and nuanced follow-up to his earlier exploration of the self-conscious middle-class sensibility of Quebec's baby-boomer generation. Containing the same raucous humour of Le Déclin, Les Invasions contains an unforeseen level of reflection and social critique, and constructs a penetrating group portrait of the generation that transformed Quebec in the '60s and '70s.

Following the same characters we saw in Le Déclin (all superbly played by the same cast), the film has Rémy Girard, the unapologetic philanderer, at its centre. In his early 50s, he now finds himself hospitalized for terminal cancer. Although divorced for 15 years, his ex-wife (Dorothée Berryman) comes to his side and arranges for his wealthy, estranged son Sébastien (gracefully played by comic Stéphane Rousseau), to fly in from London to tend to him.

And attendance he needs; one of the film's major preoccupations is the dismal state of the public health care system in Quebec. (A personal reflection, Arcand has stated, of watching his own relatives die in our deteriorating hospital system.) One of its major ironies is that Rémy, the self-proclaimed socialist, is able to bypass the system because Sébastien literally throws money at everyone who can help him, including unionized hospital staff. And here we witness one of the 'barbarian invasions': lacking all the cultural and political aspirations of their parents, the younger generation is represented by puritanical-capitalist Sébastien, and Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), a heroin-addicted daughter of one of the boomers.

Indeed, as the rest of Rémy's entourage gathers by his bedside, the interplay between the two generations mirrors the wide gulf between the ambitions of these six Quiet Revolutionaries and their ageing selves. Despite the burden of the grief of loss, however, Arcand indicates here that civilization carries on, in what is an accomplished and deeply satisfying sequel.

Les Invasions Barbares opens Friday, May 9

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