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Touches You

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The Barbarians in this film are many things: you hear the phrase from a man describing 9/11 in the context of a larger world view, as though it were the first time the Roman Empire had been invaded on its home soil by Barbarians, and it is akin to that (a lesser power connecting on a punch against a greater power, killing it through sheer will and patience) that steers the narrative in this work by French-Canadien Denys Arcand, a sequel to "Decline of the American Empire." An intellectual, who spent his life basically doing whatever he wanted, is dying of cancer. He's an idealist, a socialist, who despises what his son does for a living (his son is a capitalist). As a socialist, he should die in a bed in a public hospital surrounded by people he doesn't know... no, of course not, he should die at his home surrounded by people he loves, but he never cultivated those relationships to the extent that anyone feels a great need to be there for him in his dying hours. His son, persuaded by the one woman who loves him enough to do something for him (his estranged wife), pays them to be there for him, pays an old family friend with connections to narcotics to feed him heroine, pays former students to come pay him a visit and validate his lectures. In each case, this ironic twist (all these socialists are such whores... they don't want to be there for each other, but they all have a price)... this ironic twist feeds into the film, until the money fades into shadow and you don't even consider it anymore. All of the great ideas these intellectuals have, these 'isms'... his son's fiancée explains how ridiculous 'love' is as a reason for being with someone (her own parents divorced when she was three)... yet, she feels jealousy when the family friend is around, a stunningly beautiful woman you could never really be with due to her drug problems. Everyone in this movie is afraid of their feelings... and by the end of the movie they've essentially been paid to feel... well, everyone except the man with the money, the son, the "prince of the barbarians"... who is doing everything out of love for his mother... in the beginning...This film is like paint being mixed, then applied to a dry canvas, then transformed into a beautiful twilight shot of a lake, and dear friends, and a life well lived... somehow, in spite of itself.

A life of wine, women, and, no, not song, but left-wing causes, has left Remy (Remy Girard) pretty much alone and dying from cancer.Writer/Director Denys Arcand gives us a film that dispels the myth that we will all die a happy death.Remy's son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau) lives in London and doesn't have anything to do with his father, who rejects him because of his capitalist ways, but he comes in and gets things done for his father. The Canadian hospital and the unions are not presented in a good light. Sebastian has to grease palms with money everywhere he turns. He also calls his father's old friends and associates to get them to visit. It really gets funny when he naively goes to the police to find a source for heroin as the morphine is no longer working to alleviate his father's pain.It is not only the Canadian health care system that is pilloried, but the Catholic Church, and the imperialism of many nations. It is truly a thinking person's film. There are so many great lines throughout and some great thoughts on life and death.While Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze) helped him ease into death, his friends relieved their youth around him.He lived his life on his own terms, and he went out that way.I want more Denys Arcand.

What were all those nominations/prizes for? This is a badly edited, badly scripted, badly photographed, badly conceived "makes you think" film that mostly makes you think that a lot of filmmakers have tried to mine this territory and that a lot of them have done it better. The very last shot of the film is of the ass-end of an airplane in flight – either you think that was a metaphor (in which case it's so ham-handed and film-schoolish that it ought to be punishable by law) or it's an incredibly inept and maladroit move on the part of the editor and cinematographer. This film is mawkish when it isn't banal, and it's Big Chill-esq attempt to paint some sort of portrait of a life (perhaps) wasted but, in any event, lived in other times (politically, sexually), desperately wants to humanize the character of Rémy, but manages only to make him appear pathetic, superficial, and stupid. There are several scenes (Diane appraising antiques in the storeroom of a Catholic archdiocese; the whole pointless subplot of Rémy's daughter, adrift somewhere in the Pacific in the middle of a yacht race) that have absolutely nothing to do with the film and should have been deleted while, particularly in the final 15 minutes, jump cuts are used so jarringly and amateurishly that the attempt to render emotion and pathos is utterly and definitively ruined. Stéphane Rousseau, as the son of the dying Rémy, is wooden and substantially featureless; he's only got a couple of facial expressions in his repertoire (one of which is "beaten dog"), which you will memorize long before you get to intermission. A must miss.

There seems to be a lot of passion over the claim that the film is anti-American, anti-capitalist, etc. Many criticisms seem to dismiss the humanistic elements in this film - pain, death, reconciliation - because it has a vague intellectual, leftist, socialist face. My experiences in Canada tend to suggest that the Canadians have plenty of targets down south that deserve criticism. But does it matter? Whether the film included all these elements, the key theme was the preparation for death and reconciliation between those who will not see each other again.Doesn't anybody cry over loss? Are we scared of those things after death? or do we fear the process of dying - the loss of the person, their presence? A person died in this film - right before us - 100 minutes of decline -and what a sigh of relief that there was reconciliation in the end! That there was time to speak, time to be present. Consider the contrast between the daughter on the yacht - stranded, distant - and the son near his father. The great pain that welled up in me to see that there was no opportunity for her left.I don't cry in films, but I did here. I feared dying more than ever - other people's deaths, and mine - and I resolved to prepare for it.