The Decline of the American Empire (1986)

You've never seen a sex comedy quite like The Decline of the American Empire. That's because there's no sex in this comedy--just a lot of entertaining talk about it (and a few discreet flashbacks). The speakers are eight Montreal academics. For most of the film, the men--Rémy (Rémy Girard), Claude (Yves Jacques), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), and Alain (Daniel Brière)--fix dinner while talking about sex. The women--Dominique (Dominique Michel), Louise (Dorothée Berryman), Diane (Louise Portal), and Danielle (Geneviève Rioux)--work out while talking about sex. That evening, they all gather for dinner... and talk about sex. The Decline of the American Empire made the reputation of writer-director Denys Arcand, but his greatest success would arrive 17 years later with The Barbarian Invasions. In that 2003 Oscar-winner, Arcand revisits the lovably loquacious characters from the first film, all of whom are older, wiser--and just as obsessed with sex. --Kathleen C. Fennessy Amazon.com

Of Sex and Intellectual Competition.

The Decline of the American Empire (Le Déclin de l'empire américain) is not a film about sex. Rather, it is a film about witty dialogue. Denys Arcand's César Award winning film, The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares) (Les Invasions barbares) is the 2003 sequel to Denys Arcand's 1986 award-winning film The Decline of the American Empire. Days of Darkness (2007) finishes the trilogy. The Decline of the American Empire is a comedy/drama about eight intellectual friends (four men and four women) at the Université de Montréal, who gather to discuss sex and politics and more sex while having dinner together at a lakeside retreat. While the four men prepare the food and reflect upon their promiscuity, the four women discuss their own sexual exploits at a nearby gym. Over dinner, one of the women reveals that she has had affairs with two of the men present, one of whom is married to one of the other women in the group. Ultimately, this is a film about the meaning of sex, the objective of sex, the embarrassment and guilt men and women bring to sex, and (as Catherine Breillat might say) the comedy of sex. To many people, good sex is about winning the admiration of the right person, rather than having great sex with the wrong person. The cast includes Dominique Michel (as Dominique), Dorothée Berryman (as Louise), Louise Portal (as Diane), Pierre Curzi (as Pierre), Rémy Girard (as Rémy), Yves Jacques (as Claude), Geneviève Rioux (as Danielle), Daniel Brière (as Alain), and Gabriel Arcand (as Mario) The Barbarian Invasions reunites the same cast and continues the story seventeen years later.

This is ultimately a film about how the dynamics of love and friendship enable friends and family to talk and talk for hours about the things in life that really matter, oblivious to their surroundings. (Such conversations, in my opinion, are what make life worth living.) The resulting film is in the same genre as My Dinner with Andre in which the characters eat, drink, and talk about things that really matter (in this film, sex). The result here is witty, humorous, enchanting, and profound. The most intense action in this film occurs in the dialogue and the intellectual competition, which is the real subject of this highly-recommended film.

G. Merritt December 22, 2007

Fun, uneven, choppy

"Decline of the American Empire" is a difficult movie to define, mainly because it straddles both European and New World cinematographic tendencies (i.e., ponderous and talky on the one hand, ponderous and talky about sex on the other). Briefly, it's the story of four or five friends who, with one exception, discover that their relationships are in decline -- disintegrating because they come to know more and more about themselves and their lovers. Is it supposed to be some complex metaphor that somehow ties back in to the movie's title? That's never really clarified. But the dialogue is fun (Quebecois French, English subtitles), and the characters aren't sympathetic enough to make you feel sorry for them, so you can, in a detached way, enjoy their suffering in this offbeat comedy drama farce. December 11, 2007

A classic comedy in the European mode

Although this film came out over two decades ago, it is still fresh and funny and right on target with the observations on the nature of human relations. The sequel ("The Barbarian Invasions") is more plangent in that we see the other side of that humor, but equally fabulous, and not without its own quirky humor. Get both films, some good bread, wine, and cheese, and have a fabulous evening. January 10, 2007

a bunch of horny intellectuals talking about sex...

...which by itself is not a bad foundation for a movie, the thing is these are French-Canadian academics, with a strong emphasis on the "French" part. That is, they are supremely narcissistic, enlessly self-obsessed, preening and cloying drama queens who are entertaining and stimulating in equal measure to being annoying and exasperating.

Like other reviewers, I came upon this film after seeing its sequal, "The Barbarian Invasions" which while also very talky in a five-miles-wide-and-one-inch-deep manner, has more of an actual plot to speak of and therefore is a much more effective film that doesn't test your patience quite as much.

The sexual dialogue is often very witty, amusing, refreshingly candid and non-PC, at times even insightful. French-Canadian academics seem to have far richer sex lives than their American counterparts, that's for sure. Surprising because I thought the whole PC crapola was equally if not more pervasive up north...it must be the European influence and lack of puritannical Christianity that we still suffer from.

One sidenote: are all French-Canadian men THIS hopelessly dorky-looking? Why are all the characters so badly dressed, is this film supposed to be set in the 1970s? Weird, I always thought French people were supposedly good-looking and stylish, or is that French-French only, not the Canadian variety? I've met and known quite a few Canadians but none were such total Waldos. June 16, 2005

Critism from the inside out with intelligence!

This film is not just about men view on women or women view on men or sex viewed by men or sex viewed by women.
It is about Hystory. Denys Arcand is an hystorian first of all.
It also is about intellectuals leftist who became the new bourgeoisie.
It is about a part of the world, Québec province in Canada, who changed immensely throught out the 60's and the 70's when its french intellectuals finally had the opportunity to educate them self and becoming their own leader in every profession from top to bottom. It is about the left politics view of a new born nation that in the 80's is already getting old and its leftist intellectuals are becoming exactly what they were fighting in their youth.
This movie has so many dimension it had to have a sequel 17 years later that answers every question that it was rising in the 80's with the sublime The Barbarian Invasions.
Both are a must see! April 24, 2005

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