I'm a fan of the talkie movies--the ones that do it well, that is. Movies that have people moving about in exterior worlds while the real action takes place in their internal ones. Or, more to the point, the action takes place in the intersection of people's internal worlds, as expressed by dialogue.
One reason I love them is because the films operate on two levels. You could walk away form this particular talking movie and say that it's about sex, but of course it's not at all about sex. It's not even about one character's views or ideas, but about social behavior and how our company changes our footing and what we talk about.
There are four distinct social groups witnessed here: Men talking with men alone with nobody around to hear them. Women talking with women alone with nobody around to hear them. Lovers talking alone with nobody around to hear them, and professors talking to classes, presumably with everybody listening.
1. THE MEN
They speak like ribald poets or priests at the temple of sexuality, each rushing to prove their devotion to the act above the others.
2. THE WOMEN
Speak like detached observers into the circus of ribald poets, who occasionally get pulled out of the audience to be part of the show.
3. THE LOVERS
They either speak or have sex, but the speaking isn't about intimacy any more than the sex appears to be.
4. THE PROFESSORS
Speak in big ideas to mask their feelings of helplessness. They are talking about themselves when they talk about society. When one character talks about obsession with pleasure and happiness being signs of the end of an empire, she is really speaking about herself, and her own guilt about her own actions. That guilt plays itself out in a particularly nasty way later in the movie.
This movie is not about the ideas of the characters, but about why the characters have these ideas. I may write more about this later, but essentially this is my maxim about movies, most especially movies with lots of dialogue: Movies are about the power in relationships. Who has it, who wants it, who is acting out because they don't have it. I challenge my reader(s) to name me one movie where this is not the case textually or subtextually. I personally can't think of any.
Denys Arcand certainly understands this, and plays it well in his films.
Where we saw it: DVD | We deign to rate it: 86 outta 100