Director Denys Arcand follows up his Oscar-winning The Barbarian Invasions with Days of Darkness. (Jonathan Hayward/Associated Press)
Denys Arcand is Quebec’s most famous filmmaker, and his entry at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is arguably the most carefully watched followup act in Canadian film history. His last film, after all, was Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions), a feature about a man facing down his own mortality that won Arcand (and his producer and wife Denise Robert) an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2005.
Invasions was the sequel to Le Déclin de l'empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire), Arcand’s 1987 film about shifting gender roles and sexual mores in Quebec’s baby boomer generation. The film won Arcand his first Oscar nod, and was followed by the feature many consider his most accomplished, Jésus de Montreal, (1989, also Oscar nominated). Arcand has earned his place as a keen observer of Quebec’s distinct society, a culture that saw rapid and extreme changes within during its Quiet Revolution in the 1960s. At the time, Quebec was a nation in search of a state that flirted with the idea of separating from Canada, but ultimately didn’t. Arcand’s meditations on his native land are sometimes disquieting, but always honest.
But Arcand has also known failure. He suffered through lean years when a number of his films — notably his ventures into English-language filmmaking — were critical and box-office failures, including Love and Human Remains (1993) and Stardom (2000).
His latest is L'Âge des ténèbres (Days of Darkness), the final chapter in his loose trilogy that began with Le Déclin and Invasions. In the film, popular Québécois actor Marc Labreche plays a bureaucrat trapped in a soul-destroying job at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. There are hilarious jabs at the Quebec leisure class, with Arcand lamenting all of the great things that the bold and brash “Quebec Inc.” has brought to the province. As the film moves on, Labreche loses himself in fantasy, imagining his life as a pop star and desirable sex stud. Arcand sat down to chat at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Days of Darkness had its North American premiere.Q: This is a very bleak film, the bleakest in your trilogy. It also casts a rather dark shadow over contemporary Quebec.
A: I think that comes from a bunch of places. One of them was location. I decided to shoot the film in the Olympic Stadium. This is a building that cost us one billion dollars. And the price is still going up. The roof needs fixing. And this building serves no purpose whatsoever. You can’t play a decent baseball game or decent football game there. They did a study and found that you can’t really demolish it. It would cost another billion dollars to get rid of it, because it’s made with reinforced concrete. It would take a nuclear device to take it down, and I don’t think people living in the neighbourhood would appreciate that. So we’re living in a society that’s falling down. Our bridges are crumbling, our lakes are polluted and the roads in Montreal are like the streets of Beirut. We never repaired the sewers or the water lines for years, because we had to have Expo, the Olympics, the Gay Games, or what have you. There are lakes in Quebec where you can’t swim, you can’t even let your dog take a drink from it or it’ll die. It seems like the end of the world is coming and no one is doing anything about it. So that’s where the title, Days of Darkness, comes from.
Q: It’s funny, because what you’ve described is very specific to Quebec. Like many of your films, it is very much about Quebec but has a universal feel to it as well.
A: I try to be as deeply local as possible. Eventually, through digging, you will be universal. No one is more Swedish than [the late director Ingmar] Bergman. He’s the ultimate Swede, but he’s also obsessed with death and God.
Q: So the inspiration was the malaise that Quebec society faces?
A: It was also the publicity tour that we did for Barbarian Invasions. I did hundreds and hundreds of interviews for that film. One day, I was sitting in a limousine and I thought to myself, ‘Who would like to be in my shoes?’ I started to think about this obscure fellow, who nobody listens to. Not his wife, not his daughters, not his boss. And he has this fantasy life where he has sexy lovers, and wins prizes and so on. I spent the year that I did publicity for Invasions thinking about this. I didn’t have time to write it, but I was making mental notes the entire time.
A scene from Denys Arcand's L' Âge des ténèbres (Days of Darkness). (Cinemaginaire Inc.)
Q: This is the third in a loose trilogy that began with Decline of the American Empire and continued with Invasions. Do you feel a sense of closure now?
A: In a sense. I always said this was my second-to-last film. I wanted to finish the trilogy and then I wanted to do my own Fanny and Alexander. I want to do a film about memories now, something totally different than the past few films. That’s the next goal.
Q: The first film in the trilogy was nominated for an Oscar, the second one won an Oscar. You must be feeling some pressure with Days of Darkness and how it’s going to be received.
A: No, not at my age. I’ve won an Oscar. What, you want me to win another one? That’s it. I’ve won it. It’s the exact opposite of pressure, really. That win coupled with my age gave me a sense of freedom. I feel like I can do whatever I like. So let me alone. I’ll just enjoy myself, shooting Tarantino-like scenes of people chopping heads off — that scene was fun to shoot. When you’re 45, and you want to secure funding for your next feature, then that’s pressure. When I did Decline of the American Empire, that was my first feature in 12 years. The pressure was on then — if that hadn’t worked, I would have been condemned to television hell forever. Even Barbarian Invasions — I hadn’t had a successful film for a while, so there was pressure to have that work.
Q: I’m very impressed with Marc Labreche’s performance in Days of Darkness. He really captures that everyman perfectly. It’s a lot harder to play dull than colourful, and he does it with great dimension.
A: Absolutely. Not only was he my first choice, I wrote much of it with him in mind. I had been writing for about six months, and then Marc and I had to work together on another project. I was asked to do some brainstorming on another project, and I was asked by my wife, so I couldn’t say no. So Marc and I worked together, and I suddenly realized that we were laughing at many of the same jokes. So I asked him to reserve a few months’ time so we could work together on the film.
Q: You’ve had a thorny relationship with the Quebec press.
A: It’s strange. I don’t know what it is; you’d have to ask them. It flows. Sometimes it’s good, other times bad. It’s hard to pinpoint, really. With Barbarian Invasions, they were very nice, and very proud. But perhaps afterwards it was too much. Perhaps they felt it was time to cut him down. It’s never been discussed specifically, so I don’t know.
A: I’m a very bad improviser. But you know, it’s not my role. I’m a filmmaker, not a speech writer.
Matthew Hays is a Montreal-based writer.
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