by MATTHEW HAYS

Snapping up two major awards at Cannes, set to launch the Toronto International Film Festival, Denys Arcand's Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), the sequel to his immensely successful, Oscar-nominated '86 feature Le Déclin de l'empire américain, appears set to anchor a banner year for Quebec cinema. Along with Mambo Italiano and La Grande séduction, Arcand's comeback is marrying critical kudos with commercial success. No small feat, for sure - and undoubtedly something to celebrate.

But I couldn't help but be taken aback as I sat through Les Invasions barbares. For those who haven't yet seen it, the film reunites the main cast members from the original film. Rémy Girard reprises his role, though here he has tragically been struck by cancer, and we witness his demise as friends and family gather to say farewell. Full of Big Ideas, the film is a careful reflection on mortality and, as our critic Bertie Mandelblatt put it, a gaze into a group clearly meant to represent Quebec's all-important Boomer generation.

But something seemed severely out of place as I watched the film unspool. A central element in the original, you'll recall, was that the gay character (Claude, played by Yves Jacques), was suffering from a very, very nasty bout of an unnamed, fatal disease - clearly AIDS. As he explained to another character towards the end of the film, he was getting frequent flus and was often tired; the visuals of his illness were fleshed out rather direly. When urinating, this character pissed blood.

But there's Claude in the sequel, seemingly very healthy, in the midst of gay marital bliss, having just returned from a trip abroad. This appearance requires the kind of suspension of disbelief usually reserved for Terminator sequels - if Claude were really sick with HIV in '86, that's a full decade before the epidemic-altering protease inhibitor cocktails were readily available; applying the basic tenets of what I would regard as realism, there's virtually no way this character could possibly still be alive 15 years later.

Death defiant

It may sound nitpicky, but really, when you ponder it, it isn't. Arcand used AIDS pretty heavy-handedly in the first film. Its presence was a sure sign that, indeed, the American empire was declining, and fast. All that slutting about by Boomers had ramifications, after all. And the lack of even the mention of AIDS or HIV in the sequel seems bizarre - Les Invasions barbares, of course, is a film about mortality generally, with specific references to our collapsing health-care system. What better place to make further allusions to AIDS, an epidemic that created a massive medical crisis for minority communities in the West and has effectively crippled much of the developing world? Arcand's side-stepping of the issue appears even more glaring when one takes this into consideration. (Not to mention Arcand's pre-film career as a historian.)

This isn't to suggest, for a second, that I think Arcand's a homophobe. Quite the opposite is true, clearly. I've interviewed the man and he's a highly intelligent, compassionate artist who's collaborated with famous queers like Robert Lepage and Brad Fraser. And he deserves praise for including a gay character amid his ensemble; gays and lesbians were notably absent from the two other Boomer Retreat sub-genre films, John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) and Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983) - an absence I would argue is innately homophobic, considering the massive influence the gay liberation movement had on this generation.

This isn't a charge of homophobia, but rather a complaint of thoughtlessness on Arcand's part. Imagine the opportunity this sequel presented in terms of the subject of AIDS: perhaps, as protagonist Rémy looked back on his life and pondered his own demise, some flashbacks could have shown us what Claude suffered at the hands of an equally clueless, hemorrhaging hospital system. (For any of us who had friends die of AIDS in the '80s and '90s, it certainly isn't hard to recall the anguish of witnessing this very scene.)

Okay, so I'm not a screenwriter - but I am a disappointed moviegoer. Arcand deserves warm félicitations for Les Invasions barbares, surely one of the best films of the year. But I would argue the film also stands as another prime example of the intense difficulty filmmakers have had in dealing with the subject of AIDS. In this respect, the film is a sad failure.

Les Invasions barbares is now playing

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