Seventeen years after “The Decline of the American Empire,” writer- director Denys Arcand assembles much of the same cast for a funny, angry, fearsomely intelligent drama about a dying man’s last days.

Rémy Girard and Stéphane Rousseau are eye-dabbling good together as the victim and his estranged son, respectively. Rémy, the vulva-worshipping history professor from Arcand’s 1986 French-Canadian talkathon "The Decline of American Civilization," is dying. "The Barbarian Invasions" is a companion piece to that film, a wistful, thrillingly unrestrained love letter to life in which Rémy, played once again by Rémy Girard, savors his friends and family while awaiting his final handshake
with time.

Since this is a film by Arcand (“Jesus of Montreal”) — one of the most ruthlessly cynical filmmakers on this or any continent — don’t expect a run-of-the-mill dying dad drama. For starters, Arcand honestly and courageously lays a j’accuse on Canada’s vaunted (and, apparently, dysfunctional) socialized health care system. Stricken with inoperable cancer, Rémy is lucky not to have to share a crowded hallway with other terminals — only after his wealthy financier son Sebastien (Rousseau) floats a bribe to a union goon does Rémy get a comfortable room. Later, with businesslike dispassion, Sébastien enlists a childhood friend to purchase heroin to alleviate his father's pain. In Arcand's honest, unflinching world, dying is a dirty business.

“The Barbarian Invasions” is also about America — or, at least, the ambivalent feelings Canadians have about America. Early on, Rémy and Sebastien embark on a day trip across the border to take advantage of our sophisticated Yankee MRI equipment. Later, Rémy and his friends speak glowingly of America’s founding fathers — and somewhat less favorably of our current leadership. Arcand, who also wrote the screenplay, betrays a hint of wishful anti-American bias when a Canadian news pundit equates the 9/11 attack with a barbarian strike at the heart of the empire. Could Rémy’s own barbarian invasion — his cancer — be some sort of metaphor for America’s national collapse, or vice versa?

With the spectre of death looming, Arcand scurries from idea to idea, sniffing each and moving to the next like an excited bijon frise. Parental responsibility, addiction, religious piety, police inadequacy in the drug war — there seems to be very little about the modern condition that Arcand
doesn’t probe.

Girard and his now much-older "Decline" co-stars also have boisterous, witty discussions about sex, this time tinged with the sadness of bygone libidos.

Screened at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, "The Barbarian Invasions" was at the center of a minor furor in Quebec when the movie was snubbed for the Palm d'Or, the festival’s top honor. It makes sense that the province would embrace Arcand’s movie — it practically drips with the musky, peevish regionalism that one has come to associate with the
Quebecois.

Though engaging, all the idea- hopping and truculent French- Canadian banter is mere ribbon for the beautifully heart-wrenching central story of love and reconciliation between a son and his father. Surrounding himself with academic evidence of mankind’s failures and triumph, Rémy finally comes to grips with his own imperfect history as a parent. And though Arcand’s eulogy of the American empire might be premature, we're left with the simple, unbreachable truth that all things come to an end.