ARCAND ON MONTREAL
Director insists latest film, now at TIFF, isn’t the closing chapter of his trilogy
Inspiration is rather a mystery, venerable Québécois filmmaker Denys Arcand muses as he sits down to talk about his latest film, “The Fall of the American Empire.”
“Inspiration is the most elusive thing, and you always pray it won’t go away and at some point you’ll be totally empty, so I don’t know exactly where it comes from. What I know is that in between films, I keep notes on various stuff, stuff that interests me. It could be anything, “Arcand noted.
One file Arcand compiled delved into money laundering while another file came out of an encounter with a high-priced escort he once met in Ottawa who flew there a couple of times a year to liaise with clients in the senior echelons of government.
Yet another file revolved around a brazen 2010 daytime double shooting in Old Montreal at a “fake boutique,” where criminals were hoarding ill-gotten gains. Arcand spoke with police officers who investigated and reporters who covered the story.
“When you end up with tons of stuff like that … at some point you find a link. You find something that’s ‘OK, it can start there,’” he said.
The result is a film that examines big issues like luck and fate and a capitalist system that makes some people rich and happy, and leaves others out in the cold.
But despite the title’s similarity to one of his most acclaimed films, “The Decline of the American Empire” (1986), which earned him a Best ForeignLanguage Film Oscar nomination, and its companion “The Barbarian Invasions” (2003), for which he won the Oscar, “The Fall of the American Empire” is not, as some critics have espoused, the third and final part of a trilogy.
“It’s a throwback to my first films. When I started, my first three films were heist stories (about) police and criminals. That was back in the 1970s and I went away from there to do these intellectual films later on.”
The story centres on PierrePaul (Alexandre Landry), a hapless but philosophical delivery driver who strikes it rich from the proceeds of a botched robbery and his efforts, with some help from friends new and old, to keep them.
And while the film contrasts rich and poor, Arcand insisted he’s not offering up any wholesale condemnation of capitalism per se.
“I don’t want to be moralistic. I’m just painting a portrait and I want this portrait to be as accurate as possible and, to me, this is my duty in life in a sense. I’m painting this portrait; this is society as it is. Do you know that you have native people sleeping on the street right now in Montreal and they have no place to sleep and they’ll be there next winter? This is a statement,” Arcand said.
“Money is ambivalent … it’s neutral. You can do either good or bad. It’s a tool that some people have. The problem is some people have no tools,” he added.
Arcand did take some care in offering a sombre portrait of Montreal’s homeless Indigenous people in the film’s final frames from some footage he shot one day on impulse.
“I had no idea … how I was going to use that. I was aware enough that I said, ‘This is part of my film. These people are sleeping on the streets. I’ve got to shoot this.’ Then I put it in a corner of my editing room. We tried putting there and there and there and then we said, ‘No, it’s at the end, this is the ending of the film.’”
Arcand also expressed some ambivalence about his lifelong home, Montreal, despite how many who’ve seen the film describe its portrayal as fond and loving.
“A lot of people told me, ‘Montreal is so well filmed in this film, it’s great. How did you do it?’ I just put the camera there because the action was there. I never gave it a thought really,” Arcand said.
“I live there, so obviously I must somewhat like it because otherwise I would move. Architecturally, it’s horrendous … and the city has been very, very neglected. It’s horrible — you’ve got potholes every 10 feet — and it’s a rather poor city, it’s never been very rich. But it is where I live,” he said.
“So I’m not ecstatic saying this is the most beautiful city. Most of the time, I hate it. But I live there and there is nowhere else to go,” he added.