Black satire to die for

Just imagine! It's the last thing we expected at the Cannes Film Festival. Canada has bitten back at the big world around it and, with a film called The Barbarian Invasion, has produced the one true surprise of this so-far lacklustre festival.

It is a beauty. It blitzes all the phoniness, pretentiousness and political correctness around today, savages icons of popular and national culture, gives the finger to religious untouchables like Mother Theresa, and brought the house down at its morning screening.

Though in French and headed for tremendous art-house success, Denys Arcand's film is as accessible to a popular audience as any Carry On comedy. Arcand made a film called The Decline of the American Empire in 1987, and this new one is a kind of sequel that reassembles the same bunch of articulate and iconoclastic middle-class Canadian professionals and intellectuals, but adds a dash of randy hedonism in the shape of a father whose terminal condition hasn't tempered his acerbic tongue or fondness for the mistresses who flock to his hospital bed.

His son, a high-school drop-out, now a multi-millionaire in the London Futures market, returns to take charge of his dad's last days - by laying out Canadian dollars right, left and centre. Everyone has their price.

The bolshy hospital union readily agrees to transfer his old man from the makeshift corridor wards to a luxurious private suite; the cops are bribed to supply heroin to ease the pain of his passing; and even the illiterate students at the university where he taught have their eager palms crossed with dollars to pay condolences to their former teacher and compliment the education that they despise. Everyone is on the take or the make.

The subjects that Arcand's film touches on are the prime targets of hollow Catholicism, American imperialism, Canadian Establishment figures, and much else that is long overdue for such cruel but hilarious exposure. Even third-rate Canadian cinema is sent up. And the scene where all the members of the extended family recount how they embraced one fashionable "ism" after another will become a classic of pseudointellectual trendiness.

But it's not a downbeat film. The dying father's undiminished appetite for the pleasures of the flesh complement the sharpness of his mind and his healthy rejection of the phoniness of the age. I think we may well have a Cannes winner here.