In a sentenceEight professors talk about sex for an hour, then eat dinner, which is where the damage is done
A lakeside house in Quebec, an autumn weekend. Four men from a university history department, Rémy (Rémy Girard), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Claude (Yves Jacques) and the graduate student Alain (Daniel Brière), cook an elaborate dinner while talking about the women they have had and the ones they still want. Across town, at a gym, the women who will eat it, Dominique (Dominique Michel), Rémy’s wife Louise (Dorothée Berryman), Diane (Louise Portal) and Pierre’s young girlfriend Danielle (Geneviève Rioux), stretch and sweat and talk about the same thing from the other side. Dominique has just published a book arguing that a society which puts personal happiness first is a society in decline. Rémy has been unfaithful for years and Louise believes she knows the terms. Then the two groups drive out to the lake and sit down together.
Denys Arcand’s comedy of manners is almost all talk, and the talk is sharper than it first sounds. The first hour flatters its academics and lets them run on; the dinner takes most of it back. Stay for the dinner.
Denys Arcand puts eight people from a Quebec university history department in one house for one dinner and lets them talk. That is the whole film. For most of its 101 minutes the men are in the kitchen and the women are at a gym, and both groups discuss sex with the confidence of people who have read a great deal about it. The Decline of the American Empire is a comedy of manners in the old sense: the manners are the subject, and the joke is the distance between what these people say and what they do. It is stagey, and it is good, and the second is not in spite of the first.
The title comes from Dominique (Dominique Michel), who has written a book arguing that when a society starts to put private happiness above everything else, it is on its way down. Michel plays her dry and amused, the only one at the table who seems to have heard herself talk. Rémy Girard’s Rémy is the opposite: a cheerful, tireless adulterer who narrates his affairs to the other men as if reading out a recipe. Pierre Curzi’s Pierre has left his marriage for Danielle (Geneviève Rioux), a student young enough to make the others uneasy. Yves Jacques, as Claude, is the only gay man among them and gets the best lines, because he is the only one who is not boasting.
The women are given the harder material and play it better. Louise Portal’s Diane describes being tied up and hit by her lover Mario (Gabriel Arcand) with a frankness the film is careful not to laugh at. Dorothée Berryman’s Louise, married to Rémy, believes her marriage has an understanding, and Berryman lets us see how much work it takes to keep believing it. Danielle mentions, early and without fuss, that she pays for her studies working in a massage parlour, and the gym goes quiet for a moment. Arcand’s screenplay is at its best in these silences, when someone has said a true thing and nobody knows where to put it.
Guy Dufaux shoots the house in warm lamplight and the lake outside in the flat gold of late autumn, and he keeps the camera at the table, low, so that we are a guest and not an observer. Gaudeline Sauriol gives the house big windows and wooden walls and the look of money that does not want to be noticed. Denis Sperdouklis dresses the women in gym leotards and the men in aprons, and both groups look faintly ridiculous, which is the point. Monique Fortier cuts between kitchen and gym so that a claim made in one room is answered in the other a minute later, and the film’s argument is carried almost entirely by that cutting. François Dompierre’s score stays out of the way of the talk and comes in over the lake exteriors, where it can do no harm.
What does not work is the first hour’s fondness for its own cleverness. Rémy’s monologues go on past the point where they tell us anything, and Arcand seems to enjoy them more than he should. The men are written; the women are observed, and the difference shows. Mario’s arrival, in leather and contempt, is the one clumsy stroke, the working man brought in to make the academics look soft, and Gabriel Arcand is given little to do beyond glower. Some of the sexual bragging has dated hard, though the film knew it was bragging even then.
We laughed at Rémy for an hour, easily, the way one laughs at a friend’s stories at a party. Then, at the table, there is an exchange involving Louise that we will not describe, and we stopped laughing and felt caught out, because we had been enjoying exactly the thing the film was about to punish. The second half takes a turn, and having taken it Arcand does not soften it. That is the film’s real subject: not sex, but the cost of the talk, and who pays it.
Arcand went back to these people in The Barbarian Invasions (2003), older and sadder, and that film is the better one. This is the sharper. Watch it with someone you have been with long enough to argue afterwards, and expect to.
The reviews split down the middle, two for, two against and two we could only partly read, so the critics’ score of 60 is an average rather than a verdict anyone gave. Where there is praise it lands on Denys Arcand’s script and on the cast, whom the admiring critics take to be a sharp comic ensemble, able to make a long evening of professors talking about sex and their own hypocrisy both funny and painful. The film is read as a comedy of manners first, and those who like it like it for the wit of the conversation rather than for anything the camera does.
The dissent comes from later writers. Empire finds the satire engaging but tame, and The AV Club argues that the moralising undercuts the provocative premise, and that a film built on people sitting and talking is thin as drama and thinner as cinema. Two of the six reviews are unreadable in full, so the spread is wide and the sample smaller than the count suggests.
Wilmington calls the film a brilliant, masterful triumph, funny and painful in equal measure. He especially praises the cast’s performance as a splendid comic-dramatic ensemble.
Read the full review →The review praises the film as a deviously sardonic comedy of manners. It singles out Arcand’s smart script and the ensemble’s portrayal of the characters’ hypocrisy.
Read the full review →The review’s verdict and specific praise are unavailable because the article could not be accessed. The page only displays a JavaScript and ad-blocker notice.
Read the full review →The accessible page identifies this as a film review, but its critical verdict is unavailable. The metadata describes the professors’ gathering and conversations about sex.
Read the full review →The review finds the film’s satire engaging but ultimately tame. It praises Arcand’s use of emotional consequences to puncture the academics’ smug intellectual superiority.
Read the full review →Tobias gives the film a negative verdict, arguing that its moralizing undercuts its provocative premise. He singles out the theatrical setup and dialogue-driven structure as dramatically and cinematically thin.
Read the full review →
The Barbarian Invasions · not on Fi1m yetArcand’s return to the same table, seventeen years on, with the bill due.
My Dinner with Andre · not on Fi1m yetTwo men, one meal, two hours of talk that never runs dry.
The Big ChillAmerican contemporaries reunite and discover their principles did not survive the decade.
FestenA Danish family dinner where the speeches go badly wrong, on purpose.
Un air de famille · not on Fi1m yetA French family in a bar for one evening, wounding each other with great precision.
