In the pointed satire The Fall of the American Empire, Pierre-Paul (Alexandre Landry) chafes at his dead-end blue-collar job as an express freight delivery driver; he feels that, with his PhD in Philosophy, he has been unjustly screwed out of a much better life by the System. He may be right, but he’s also a self-absorbed putz, who is justifiably dumped by his girlfriend. But then he happens across a windfall fortune of ill-gotten cash – and keeps it. The critical questions, of course, are how he can escape from the ruthless gang and the corrupt police who want to recover the money, and how will he be able to spend the money without getting caught? Pierre-Paul is a heads-in-the-clouds intellectual, and he is totally over-matched.
Fortunately, Pierre-Paul makes the acquaintance of a criminal mastermind, Sylvain ‘The Brain’ Bigras (Rémy Girard), who has just been released from prison. Pierre-Paul also can’t resist blowing some of his newfound treasure on Montreal’s most expensive escort, the astonishingly beautiful Aspasie (Maripier Morin). She used to be the mistress of the powerful banker Taschereau (Pierre Curzi), and soon Pierre-Paul has a team of confederates with real know-how.
Veteran French-Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand portrays a society corrupted head-to-toe by the capitalist imperative to acquire more and more money. And all of the characters make a point of insisting getting theirs in American dollars. The two older guys – one a lifelong outlaw and convict and the other a socially and politically prominent banker – hit if off immediately; after all, they’re both crooks.
Arcand comes at his films from the the Left, but he skewers the doctrinaire Left with equal glee. He pokes fun at the personal foibles of individuals on the Left, but saves his savagery for the inequalities of Capitalism. While he is sending up the entire Capitalist system. he makes his points without descending into a screed. All the fun in The Fall of the American Empire is dotted with realistic – and some real – plight of the homeless – depicted neither with finger-wagging or as maudlin.
The satire fits into the formula of a heist film – the assembling of a team to pull off a job. Of course, here they already HAVE the money, and they don’t need to steal it. To get the benefit of the money, they need to launder it and hide it from tax authorities.
Arcand stalwarts Rémy Girard and Pierre Curzi both give superb performances. Vincent Leclerc, as a homeless man who volunteers at a soup kitchen, has an especially moving scene.
Arcand is known for his trilogy The Decline of the American Empire (1986), The Barbarian Invasions (2003 and Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Language Film) and Days of Darkness (2006 – which I haven’t seen).
While the love story between Pierre-Paul and Aspasie and the Robin Hood aspect of our heroes’ plans are fantasies, The Fall of the American Empire has an authenticity at its core – the impact of disparity of wealth in a system rigged in favor of the Haves. And it’s damn funny – progressively funnier as the money-laundering scheme takes shape. The Fall of the American Empire opens June 7 in the Bay Area, and will spread to more local theaters in June.