Remy: All my life I went to bed with the world's most gorgeous women. Then one morning I awoke realizing I'd fallen asleep dreaming of the Carribean. I'd grown old. Women had deserted my dreams....We can't decipher the past, how can we know the future? No one ever knows what'll happen to them. Except me, now. I know.
Nathalie: Are you scared?
Remy: Sure am. I don't want to stop living. I loved life so much.
Nathalie: What was it you loved?
Remy: Everything. Wine, books, music, women. Above all women.
Nathalie: Were there many of them?
Remy: Yes
Nathalie: Don't they begin to seem the same?
Remy: A bit, yes.
Nathalie: The trips you dreamed of, did you make them?
Remy: Nowadays there are tourists everywhere.
Nathalie: It's not your present you cling on. It's your past life. That life is already dead.
Remy: Perhaps.
Remy (Remy Girard) is a 50-something professor who is on his deathbed and succumbing to cancer. This brings him together with his estranged family and old time friends. Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau) is very unlike his father and works in capitalistic London. Looking at his son, Remy remarks, "The barbarians everywhere, tomorrow...their Prince approaches". Though they had never seen eye to eye, Sebastien makes sure all his father's wishes are granted.
This movie explores a man's lust for life who refuses to come to terms with his impending death. He's been searching a meaning for his life and "feels as helpless as the day he was born". In the end, the father and son resolve the tension between them as Remy says that he'd want for his son to have a son as fine as him.
Denys Arcand manages to blend the humor, the sadness and the nostalgia all so well, it'll leave you with an experience that you can't explain, almost like an emptiness after it's over.
Rating: 8.5/10
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