Barbarian Invasions (2003) (nat)

The 2003 winner of the best foreign language film Oscar is D-E-P-R-E-S-S-I-N-G!! But not in a it's-still-a-good-movie way. In a I-can't-believe-I-just-watched-someone-die-and-didn't-learn-a-thing-from-it way. The basic plot is that Remy is dying of cancer. He's in a hospital in Montreal and thanks to the poor healthcare situation, he's in a room with two other guys (he's lucky he's not in the hallway) and he's not receiving the best care ever. His ex-wife Louise calls their son Sebastien (all of these names have accents I can't replicate here) who lives in London and is quite rich; she asks Sebastien to come and help with his father. He and his fiancee, Gaelle, come and shake things up. More or less, Sebastien bribes everyone he comes in contact with to get "the best" for his father even though his father is a womanizing cad who cheated on his mother 6 months after they were married and kept up multiple affairs throughout his life and the father/son duo never had a real relationship. Sebastien bribes his way into a private room (on a closed floor of the hospital), bribes the union to get their help, bribes the nurses, takes his father to the US for expensive tests that he sends to a friend overseas to interpret, bribes his father's former students to visit, essentially bribes his father's friends to come visit . . . . . The apparent moral of the story is if you've got a stack of bills, you, too, can connect with your dying father. Further adding to the morality of the story is that the overseas doctor friend recommends heroine over the prescribed morphine. To the dr's credit, he recommends a trial that is testing the benefits. St. Sebastien, however, goes to the local police department and asks a couple of narcotics officers where to score. That only sort of works in that they tell him to ask some "musicians and poets"---ta da--his father's friends are just that, a bunch of academic sorts who have illicit affairs, drink a lot of wine, eat things like scrambled eggs and truffles, smoke pot, change political alliances frequently . . . . . you know the sort. Well, low and behold, one of his father's former mistresses (that's right, in that group of friends is not one, but two, former mistresses--visiting while the ex-wife is there and there seem to be no grudges) has a daughter (named Nathalie) who just happens to be a junkie. She scores for herself and the father and, along the way (of course!) learns the errors of her junky ways. The heroine "helps" (really in the same way morphine would, just lessening the pain) but then they all decide to take the dying man to the lake house of one of the friends where he miraculously does not get better and the junky (who is now on methadone) helps euthanize him. Meanwhile there are some longing looks at Sebastien from the junky and some semi-aware looks at her from the fiancee and the fiancee gives some sort of speech to the father about love that I didn't quite get but nothing seems to materialize out of any of this--the junky gets to live in the father's flat where he seduced many woman and Sebastien and the fiancee fly home to London. Also, it is, of course, wintery when the man dies. Overwrought pathetic fallacy, anyone?

I really can see absolutely no reason why this movie is on the list. It's not that good. The acting isn't spectacular. The story isn't that interesting. It doesn't make that much of a statement about the medical care situation in Montreal (the man was going to die anyway and the "help" the son gave was of the illegal sort not the correct-medical-neglect sort and there isn't any indication that the morphine wasn't working). It doesn't make a big statement about father/son relationships or friendships or marriages or gay relationships or father/daughter relationships (all of which are included--I mean what's an academic without a gay friend?) No big statement about academia--I couldn't even really figure out what the man taught (politics? history? philosophy?). No live life to the fullest nonsense. No give up and die already edict. No condemnation or endorsement of drug use. No condemnation or endorsement of police looking the other way. Lots of religious references but no real payoff. No going to God. No rebuttal of God. Nothing but a man dying. And that's not really movie worthy.