Arcand's 'mistake'
An outright jovial Denys Arcand talks openly about his latest film, Days of Darkness, and why he, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, willingly created a middle fantasy sequence that runs 'contrary to every law of dramatic structure'
LIAM LACEY
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
March 19, 2008 at 2:41 AM EDT
The world, wrote 18th-century author Horace Walpole, is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. For Quebec's most celebrated filmmaker, Denys Arcand, both perspectives seem equally true.
Drinking good wine, eating a lunch of Provençal salad and seafood while discussing his new film, Days of Darkness, Arcand was in jovial spirits. He laughed easily, talked about the fun of using out-and-out slapstick in a movie for the first time, the amusement of fantasy sequences. He cheerfully declared the middle section of the film – a medieval fantasy sequence – “a mistake.”
“I knew it as I wrote it. It's contrary to every law of dramatic structure, completely un-perfect. I knew better than this. I did it because I had to do it. I know you're not supposed to have the whole direction and tone of the film change in the fourth act although – not to make comparisons – in the fourth act, Hamlet goes to England and he disappears with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and suddenly he reappears in a graveyard.”
Ah, the graveyard. As personally upbeat as Arcand seems to be, he sees signs and portents of doom everywhere: global warming, epidemics, illiteracy and superstition.
“Personally, I think we are going towards another Dark Age. After the first Dark and Middle Ages and the fall of the Roman Empire, society crumbled for a period and there was a rise in faith and religious wars. I see this coming again in modern times.”
In fact, the movie was originally going to be called The Dark Ages but Arcand said that American distributors objected, perhaps because the title was either too literate or too negative. Logically, The Dark Ages would be the sensible follow-up to his last film, the Oscar-winning The Barbarian Invasions (2003). Along with the Oscar-nominated The Decline of the American Empire (1986), the three films form a loose trilogy.
If those previous films were dramas marked by mordant wit, Days of Darkness – which opens on Friday in Toronto and Vancouver – represents a shift to the broadly satiric. Arcand described it as “both funnier and more sombre. It's a film of extremes.”
It stars Quebec comedian Marc Labrèche as Jean-Marc, a Walter Mitty-like figure who lives a rich fantasy life, typically involving beautiful women (Diane Kruger, Emma de Caunes) pandering to his sexual desires and ego. In real life, he's cuckolded by his real-estate-agent wife and a works as a minor civil servant in the government complaints department, located in Montreal's crumbling Olympic Stadium. The time seems to be the near future, where plagues ravage the countryside and civil discord is rampant.
Initially, said Arcand, the movie came directly out of his experiences with the extraordinary success with The Barbarian Invasions. “I did 70 billion interviews all over the world, I took billions of planes, but I was always alone. And I wondered, ‘Who would like to be in my shoes?' There must be a man somewhere this would please, who would love to be performing at Cannes, facing you, talking to these microphones. Slowly, this image came to mind of this man, living in Laval, who nobody ever listens to, who fantasizes about making grand declarations the way I do….”
In its way, Days of Darkness is Arcand's grand declaration. He described The Decline of the American Empire as the collapse of relations between the sexes, and The Barbarian Invasions as one man who, facing his death, realizes he has nothing but his friendships. The current film is a look at “a whole society disintegrating.”
The fourth act “mistake,” which draws parallels between modern life and the medieval world, was inspired by a strange sight Arcand saw one Sunday when he was driving by Mont Royal in Montreal. He saw people dressed in medieval armour, “with wooden swords and maces, hitting each other in the face. I got so interested in this. In the U.S. they have these medieval fairs everywhere.”
Arcand visited such a medieval fair in Florida and was struck by how the participants found something fulfilling that was missing in their own modern lives. He met, for example, an engineer who designs aircraft engines who said dressing up and doing battle represented “the happiest times of his life.” He met a woman who said this was the only place she could meet a man “who would recite poetry to her. These events are very important to the people that attend them and provide a sort of refuge when normal life becomes unbearable.”
If there's a treatment for “the shackles of modern society,” Arcand doesn't claim to know what it is. The former history student thinks most of the grand historical theories, from communism to democracy, “have fallen apart.” The best we can hope for is some “personal peace of mind” through modest realism: “Stop dreaming. Stop looking at Entertainment Tonight and thinking that you're going to bed with Angelina Jolie tomorrow. You won't.”
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