Butler's Cinema Scene

Alexandre Landry, Remy Girard

“THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE” My rating: B 

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Perched somewhere between light-hearted caper film and savage social critique, “The Fall of the American Empire” slips effortlessly into Denys Arcand’s impressive resume.

In films like “The Decline of the American Empire” and the Oscar-winning “The Barbarian Invasions” this giant of French Canadian cinema has specialized in amusing sex comedies that mask (barely) his trenchant observations on how self-indulgence and obsessive intellectualism are blithely leading us into the end days.

(Arcand also gave us the jaw-dropping “Jesus of Montreal,” a religious allegory about an actor playing Christ in a church-sponsored  passion play.)

On the surface “Fall…” gives us the familiar story of a Joe Blow who stumbles across a fortune in mob money and must go through all sorts of moral and physical gymnastics to keep it.

It’s got tough cops (possibly corrupt ones), vengeful gangsters, shady businessmen and, of course, a whore with a heart of gold.

In the film’s first scene our “hero,”  bespectacled delivery truck driver Pierre-Paul (Alexandre Landry), is sitting in a Quebec diner with his bank clerk girlfriend Linda (Florence Longpre). Basically he’s blaming his empty and pointless life on his advanced intellect;  only stupid people, he claims,  enjoy material success.  Pierre-Paul has a handful of post-graduate degrees and he’s still lifting crates for minimum wage.

After agreeing that the Trump phenomenon can be explained by the maxim that “imbeciles worship cretins,” the couple decide to go their separate ways.   Neither seems too broken up about it.

That afternoon on  his delivery route Pierre-Paul stumbles across  the robbery of a strip mall shop used by the local syndicate as its underground bank. The stickup men and their victims go down in a deadly crossfire;  Pierre-Paul is startled but has the presence of mind to snatch two cash-stuffed gym bags dropped by the perps. He stashes them in his modest apartment.

Maripier Morin, Alexandre Landry

While he may be able to hold forth on Kant and Wittgenstein, Pierre-Paul is profoundly unready for life in the fast  lane.  The first thing he does with his windfall is to order a session with a top-dollar call girl who bills herself as Aspasie (also the name of a famous beauty in ancient Greece, a classical allusion our protagonist cannot ignore).

Apasaie is actually Camille (Maripier Morin), a heart-melting beauty who, somewhat inexplicably, is charmed by Pierre-Paul’s general ineptness. Maybe she takes pity on him, since he seems determined to do things that put him in the cross hairs of a couple of police detectives (Maxim Roy, Louis Morriset), not to mention the mobsters trying to retrieve their cash.

Recognizing that he’ll have to launder all of his dirty money, Pierre-Paul approaches Sylvain (Arcand regular Remy Girard), the infamous “banker to bikers” who has just been released from prison.  The pony-tailed Sylvain has an extensive background in moving around ill-gotten gains.

For her part, Camille brings into the fold a former lover, a sixty something financier (Pierre Curzi) with the wherewithal to open bank accounts all over the globe and keep money flowing endlessly between them.

Before it’s done Pierre-Paul’s ex, Linda, comes on board to crunch numbers.

The whole idea is to get away with someone else’s fortune.  Ironically, our philosopher hero never asks whether that’s the right thing to do. (We cut him some slack here because most men would do anything to stay in close proximity to the enchanting Camille.)

If Landry’s Pierre-Paul is the bland center of “Fall…”, the surrounding characters compensate with oodles of color and character spikes.

Ultimately, though, it’s not so much the story that grabs us here as it is the withering observations writer/director Arcand makes along the way.

| Robert W. Butler