Buy posters from this movie

The dying man is Rémy (Rémy Girard), a womanizing history professor, whose son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau) has traveled from London to Montreal to reunite his father's old friends and lovers for one final time. Sébastien is an investment banker with a seemingly endless supply of cash that he uses to grease the skids, getting his father settled in to a spacious room with a private nurse (Micheline Lanctôt) in an overcrowded hospital, paying three of Rémy's former students to visit him, and procuring heroin to ease his father's pain.

Gathering around Rémy are his ex-wife Louise (Dorothée Berryman) and two ex-lovers (Dominique Michel, Louise Portal), and old friends Claude and Pierre (Yves Jacques, Pierre Curzi), who have scattered around the world and led disparate lives since their last meeting in 1986.

As in The Decline of the American Empire, this group of French-Canadian free-thinkers doesn't do much but sit around and reminisce about the good old days of debauchery when they were the sexual pioneers of the freewheeling '60s. Oh, they elevate their conversations with discussion about how the Catholic Church and the world have changed around them, and Arcand interjects a bit of an overview of the sorry state of socialized medicine in Canada, but in the end "Invasions" is all about a bunch of people who seem to bask in their love of their own words and the sounds of their own voices.

For me, the most sympathetic character is Sébastien, the prodigal son who comes home to care for his father during his last days despite their years of estrangement, who orchestrates the reunion of old friends and lovers, and who showers his father with love in the only way he knows how -- by whipping out his checkbook. Sébastien, whom Rémy refers to as "an ambitious and puritanical capitalist" to Rémy's own "sensual socialist," turns out to be the one with the heart to know exactly how to make his father's last days more comfortable, and the means to accomplish it.

link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8349&reviewer=376
originally posted: 07/18/04 22:16:58
 printer-friendly format