Denys Arcand - Northern Stars

Denys Arcand
b. June 25, 1941 in Deschambault, Québec

Denys Arcand is now firmly established as one of Canada’s handful of 'star' directors, but not too long ago he was worried he would end up in the Salvation Army hostel he could see from the room where he was writing Le Déclin de l’empire américain. Before the huge success of this breakthrough film, Arcand had been labelled an unbankable troublemaker, the kind of filmmaker who made politically explosive documentaries such as On est au coton. In the mid-1980s, although he had won acclaim for a string of irreverent fiction features and a couple of mainstream hits in Quebec, this so-called agent provocateur found it hard to make a living in the film business. Arcand’s films portray a world so irredeemably corrupt, that he has been accused of being a cynic and a nihilist; however, his movies also convey inherent values expressed with wit and insight. 'I can’t bear people who don’t want to see what appears, to me, to be reality,' Arcand once told Cinema Canada. 'I don’t know why. I’ve always been that way ... it seems to me that the first attribute of humanity is intelligence.'

Arcand spent his childhood in a riverside village and moved to Montreal, where he attended a Jesuit school. In 1962, after an apprenticeship in the University of Montreal’s theatre groups, he and some friends (including Denis Héroux and the assistance of established NFBers, Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, and Bernard Gosselin) made a film about student life, Seul ou avec d’autres. Then, like most budding filmmakers, Arcand went to work for the NFB. The commissioned documentaries he shot didn’t cause much of a stir until the Board refused to release On est au coton, a gritty, angry exposé of Quebec’s textile industry. Although copies were circulated clandestinely throughout Quebec, the ban lasted six years.

When Arcand turned to fiction, his work began to modulate outrage with the amused disdain of a sophisticated observer. In Réjeanne Padovani, a sleazy construction mogul has his unfaithful wife murdered during a party and entombs her under the asphalt of a just-completed highway. Arcand expresses shock at the depravity of his characters but he is aware of the layer of comedy they provide. By the time he directed Le Déclin, which picked up the International Critics Award at Cannes, eight Genies, the Golden Reel Award, and an Academy Award Nomination, Arcand admitted that he felt affection as well as amusement toward his self-deceptive, philandering characters. In fact, his biting humour can turn on a dime into passionate intensity. Jésus de Montréal, released in 1989, is perhaps

Arcand’s richest, most rewarding creation. In it he orchestrates perfectly timed mood swings between irreverence and reverence, detached irony and dark tragedy. In Le Déclin and Jésus, Arcand mastered the unobtrusive visual style and rapid pacing that he admires in classic American moviemaking.

His attempts at making films in the English language – Love and Human Remains and Stardom – did not live up to the high standards he set with his French-language works. He returned to form, however, with Les Invasions barbares, his most successful film at the box-office to date, and netting him his first Oscar on his third attempt. Reprising the characters he created in Le Déclin, Les Invasions continued Arcand's very articulate and witty love / hate relationship with the United States but without the deeper political bite of the first film. But no matter what two official languages he works in, Arcand's approach to filmmaking is straightforward, understated, and laconic. In this, he resembles the Spanish master, Luis Buñuel, another cool, witty minimalist who swam through powerful currents.

Go to Denys Arcand's filmography