The decline of Denys Arcand?

Days of Darkness, the latest from famed Quebecois director Denys Arcand, has not ranked high on anyone’s list of the director’s finest achievements. Allegedly the third part of a trilogy that began with The Decline of the American Empire (1986) and continued with The Barbarian Invasions (2003), this new film feels more like a lighthearted American Beauty with touches of Brazil. While early reviews have been harsh (an inevitable problem with following a work as important as The Barbarian Invasions), the film undoubtedly would have benefited from another rewrite to iron out some of the sloppiness in the script. Still, Days of Darkness emerges as one of the more entertaining mid-life crisis films of recent years. It’s that rare thing: a genuinely enjoyable art house flick.

Jean-Marc Leblanc (Marc Labreche) is a mousy, middle-aged civil servant who’s a dead-ringer for U.S. talk show host Alan Colmes. His day alternates between a stifling job and an even more stifling life at home, where his frigid wife and daughters ignore him. Leblanc’s only solace comes from a large pornography collection and his outrageous fantasies of a life with wealth and power. Fantasy is easy to spot: they usually end with a stunning woman demanding sex.

Days of Darkness is not the polished work one might expect from a filmmaker of Arcand’s stature. The first hour grows fairly repetitive, and there’s a long, awkward scene at a medieval fair that could easily be confused with one of Leblanc’s dream sequences. It lacks the strong emotional centre of The Barbarian Invasions, but what it does have is a droll, biting sense of humour. There are lots of big laughs, particularly in Arcand’s depiction of an increasingly oppressive Quebec (the word “negro” is declared illegal and security guards track down smokers like Big Brother). Labreche too is very funny and believable in his suburban everyman role. Days of Darkness may be a lark, but it’s the smartest and funniest lark currently playing.