Celebrity Biographies
Denys Arcand
Filmmaker with a powerful intellectual background and vision of history. Both in his initial documentary stage, and later in fiction, the Canadian Denys Arcand has known how to look beyond appearances at a western society in sharp decline, but which struggles to maintain some essences, a certain spiritual and idealistic breath that he yearns for after his death. usual pragmatic cynicism.
Denys Arcand was born in 1941 in Deschembault, 40 kilometers from Québec, in a Catholic family with intellectual concerns. Among his brothers, one was an anthropologist, another is a criminologist and the third is an actor, which shows his interest in everything. to inquire into human nature and its motivations. He studied with the Jesuits, and would witness the crisis of the Church in the 1960s, with the emptying of churches and the secularization of many priests. As a teenager, the Arcands moved to Montreal, and although Denys then became fond of tennis, he ended up going to university, where he began studying history. It was at that time that he began to be attracted to the cinema. An idea of his fans in the 1960s is given by the fact that some weekends he was able to drive several hundred kilometers to New York,
In 1963 he joined the National Film Board of Canada, where he did extensive documentary work in his native French. The most important, and somewhat controversial, was On est au coton (1970), which brought to the fore some of the bad practices of the textile industry in his country. He is socially restless in the works of that time, for example in La lutte des travailleurs d’hôpitaux (1975) he addresses the employment situation in the health sector. Although carried out at the request of the CSN, Confederation of National Unions, he was not accommodating to them. In 1982 he premiered Le confort et l’indifférence , in which he showed his very personal point of view on the referendum two years earlier to promote Québec’s independence.
Arcand’s first fiction films also saw the light of day in the 1970s. La maudite galette (1972), Réjeanne Padovani (1973) and Gina (1975) used gangster plots as an excuse to draw a sharp portrait of the Quebec society that he knew so well. His ways and his particular background allowed him to sign the script for Duplessis (1978), a miniseries dedicated to the former Prime Minister of Québec in two periods separated by World War II, Maurice Duplessis.
After filming another criminal plot, Le crime d’Ovide Plouffe (1984), Arcand finally achieved a place on the international film map thanks to The Decline of the American Empire (1986), where he portrayed a social class he knows well, the of university professors, together with their affective and intellectual insecurities, where narcissism and sexual liberation are striking, which, they note, has collapsed institutions that once gave confidence, such as marriage. The film would be nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film and won the FIPRESCI award at Cannes. Almost 20 years later, Arcand would resume many of his characters in The Barbarian Invasions.(2003), which was a continuation of the reflection on the decline of Western civilization, nuanced after a time when so many things had happened, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and where he speaks of a new generation illiterate and glued to the computer, more pragmatic and lacking in ideals, and to which the example of their parents is of no use to them. Here the Oscar finally fell, in addition to the fact that in Cannes it won the award for best original screenplay. A few years earlier, in 1989, the festival of festivals had recognized him with another award, the Grand Jury Prize, for Jesús de Montreal , in which religion, through a representation of the allegorical and modernized Passion, served to appeal once again. to values that were being lost.
So much recognition invited to try to shoot in English to have a greater reach among the international public. But his titles From him The true nature of love (1993) and Estrellato (2000), did not have much impact.
Arcand is more loose when he dives into social criticism where he reproaches the superficiality of the thought of so many people, the star theme of The Age of Ignorance (2007). In The Fall of the American Empire (2018), where he abounds in the subject, even with a nod in the title –not in the characters– to his 1986 film, it also links to his taste for criminal plots, since the trigger for the action It is a robbery witnessed by a doctor of philosophy who questions the foundations of the society in which he lives, especially the blind trust in money.
The release of The Fall of the American EmpireHe did it with this declaration of principles, a complete question for someone who sees his life progress and observes a society with self-destructive tendencies: “I make films trying, in my own way, to comply with a secular motto: to act as a mirror of life and time. We are all subject to the American empire, even in the most remote corners of our planet. That empire is dying and its convulsions affect us in all their brutality. Those who pinned their hopes on a hypothetical resignation of Trump forget that after Caligula came Nero and three centuries of inexorable disintegration. In Canada we live comfortably under the umbrella of the “pax americana”, but we began to catch the moral decadence of the empire. The omnipotence of money is one of the symptoms.
Denys Arcand is married to producer Denise Robert, who is behind titles like The Widow of Saint-Pierre . Her husband has produced every movie since Stardom . They have an adoptive daughter of Chinese origin, Ming Xia.