I could not admit this in the reaction paper I wrote for this film, but I walked out of the first half of the film (which our professor stopped early because he had to be at a meeting) reeling. Walking home, I kept being afraid that the people I passed would leap up to make some bizaare sexual confession. When I stopped off at the bank, I expected the teller to burst into a confidance of an orgy. The film leaves you in a bit of a fog, especially since it is set in a university. Seeing it, one starts to madly wonder if this sort of hedonism ac
tually occurs regularly, and somehow one has just been blind and naive. Hopefully not. Set in a Montreal university community, gender roles are switched as the men stay at home to cook a gourmet meal, while the women work out at a local gym. The subject of conversation among both parties is unrelentingly about sex: promiscuous sex, S&M sex, wild orgy sex, interspersed by brief comments about the contents of the refrigerator or the well done-ness of the fish pie, which inevitably turn out to be sexual innuendos. The men are boastful: the history professor gleefully relates picking up “two American girls” one night and then taking the drugs they gave him when he sleeps with his wife the next; the women are ironic: Remy’s wife Louise tells of being stuck with a somewhat lethargic partner at an orgy that Remy persuaded her to go to, and Dominique tells of a under-endowed Italian policeman she once bedded. In both sets, there are innocents who are being educated in the hedonistic ways of their more sexually-experienced friends. The young male PhD student, who initially seems somewhat askance at the confessions of his professors, begins to test out his own dirty stories and ends up laying the recently published chair of the history department, Dominique. The somewhat naïve housewife, Louise, who knows her husband has affairs but has no idea the extent has a more upsetting night when Dominique reveals that not only has she slept with Louise’s husband Remy, but that Remy is the most sexually voracious and promiscuous man in the department. She seeks refuge in the arms of her gay friend Claude, a “cruiser” and art history professor who is worried about the blood in his urine. Claude holds her all night, and the ménage all join each other for breakfast again the next day. Fortunately for a squeamish viewer like me, most of the sex is talk; there are a few flashbacks to illustrate the sexual tales, but they aren’t as alarming as they could be—in fact most of them are rather funny, in a disturbing sort of way. The film is remniscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron—in which a whole party of men and women sit around eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories.
And perhaps this Boccaccio connection is a good way to open my reaction paper since neither my queasy prudery or my summary of the film will be of interest to my professor. So, here is what I turned in:
tually occurs regularly, and somehow one has just been blind and naive. Hopefully not. Set in a Montreal university community, gender roles are switched as the men stay at home to cook a gourmet meal, while the women work out at a local gym. The subject of conversation among both parties is unrelentingly about sex: promiscuous sex, S&M sex, wild orgy sex, interspersed by brief comments about the contents of the refrigerator or the well done-ness of the fish pie, which inevitably turn out to be sexual innuendos. The men are boastful: the history professor gleefully relates picking up “two American girls” one night and then taking the drugs they gave him when he sleeps with his wife the next; the women are ironic: Remy’s wife Louise tells of being stuck with a somewhat lethargic partner at an orgy that Remy persuaded her to go to, and Dominique tells of a under-endowed Italian policeman she once bedded. In both sets, there are innocents who are being educated in the hedonistic ways of their more sexually-experienced friends. The young male PhD student, who initially seems somewhat askance at the confessions of his professors, begins to test out his own dirty stories and ends up laying the recently published chair of the history department, Dominique. The somewhat naïve housewife, Louise, who knows her husband has affairs but has no idea the extent has a more upsetting night when Dominique reveals that not only has she slept with Louise’s husband Remy, but that Remy is the most sexually voracious and promiscuous man in the department. She seeks refuge in the arms of her gay friend Claude, a “cruiser” and art history professor who is worried about the blood in his urine. Claude holds her all night, and the ménage all join each other for breakfast again the next day. Fortunately for a squeamish viewer like me, most of the sex is talk; there are a few flashbacks to illustrate the sexual tales, but they aren’t as alarming as they could be—in fact most of them are rather funny, in a disturbing sort of way. The film is remniscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron—in which a whole party of men and women sit around eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories.And perhaps this Boccaccio connection is a good way to open my reaction paper since neither my queasy prudery or my summary of the film will be of interest to my professor. So, here is what I turned in:
The Decline of the American Empire directed by Denys Areand (1987)
The medieval Italian writer Boccaccio opens his collection of tales the Decameron with a reference to the black plague, “…in the illustrious city of Florence, the fairest of all the cities of Italy, there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities, … had spread into the West.”Boccaccio’s reference to the Black Plague invokes the end of an epoch—the death of an “iniquitous” society. Fleeing the plague a group of young people seek refuge in the country and spend ten days together eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories. There are echoes of the Decameron in Denys Areand’s film The Decline of the American Empire, which opens with a long tracking shot that finally focuses on the chair of the history department Dominique being interviewed, by the graduate student Diane, on tape about her new book. Dominique’s interview sets up the philosophical underpinnings of the rest of the film; she speaks of a society in decline, later positing that Marx and Freud based their theories on guilt and jealousy over sex. When their grand theories don’t pan out then, people have nothing to base their lives on. In the face of doom, the reigning order seems to be to eat, have sex, and to, as Louise puts it, intellectualize their misery. The wild sexual tales the groups of men and women tell are devices to combat a “suburban” boredom—the meaninglessness of growing into old age, of pursuing an academic career when there are “17,000 scholarly articles published a day.” The household of bawdy storytellers in the Decameron is reflected in the household of intellectuals who seem to belong to a type of commune, living in neighboring houses and eating meals together. The apocalypse, which has already struck in the Decameron, has not yet occurred in The Decline of the American Empire, but it hangs over the Montreal party like a dark cloud. In the first half of the film as the characters carelessly relate tales of casual group sex and S&M, there is an impending sense of doom. The gay character Claude laughs along with the other men about the STD’s their wives and lovers complain about (“Disease is a part of sex”), but privately agonizes in fear over the blood in his urine. When Claude tells of how he is often robbed while “cruising,” and a little later Dominique tells how she has also been robbed in foreign countries after sex with strangers, I felt uneasily that these intellectuals are living dangerously—that something is bound to go terribly wrong. But then, they know they are living dangerously—the uncertainty is part of what gives them pleasure. Diane, who is experimenting with sado-masochism with her brutish boyfriend, says of their connection, “We could kill each other.” When the sinister boyfriend shows up outside the house and eavesdrops on the men’s dirty stories, it seems as though the “real” thing has showed up and caught them at their game. He embodies the sense of foreboding I felt through the first half of the film. The characters seem so caught up in their dangerous pursuit of pleasure that they have lost any connection to each other. The women sneer at men’s small penises and their obsession over them. The men scoff at women’s desire for romance before sex. Remy delights in “knowing the dinner is on and stopping off on the way” or in “not mixing his sex life with his marriage.” The characters seem to constantly act out of disdain for each other.
The medieval Italian writer Boccaccio opens his collection of tales the Decameron with a reference to the black plague, “…in the illustrious city of Florence, the fairest of all the cities of Italy, there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities, … had spread into the West.”Boccaccio’s reference to the Black Plague invokes the end of an epoch—the death of an “iniquitous” society. Fleeing the plague a group of young people seek refuge in the country and spend ten days together eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories. There are echoes of the Decameron in Denys Areand’s film The Decline of the American Empire, which opens with a long tracking shot that finally focuses on the chair of the history department Dominique being interviewed, by the graduate student Diane, on tape about her new book. Dominique’s interview sets up the philosophical underpinnings of the rest of the film; she speaks of a society in decline, later positing that Marx and Freud based their theories on guilt and jealousy over sex. When their grand theories don’t pan out then, people have nothing to base their lives on. In the face of doom, the reigning order seems to be to eat, have sex, and to, as Louise puts it, intellectualize their misery. The wild sexual tales the groups of men and women tell are devices to combat a “suburban” boredom—the meaninglessness of growing into old age, of pursuing an academic career when there are “17,000 scholarly articles published a day.” The household of bawdy storytellers in the Decameron is reflected in the household of intellectuals who seem to belong to a type of commune, living in neighboring houses and eating meals together. The apocalypse, which has already struck in the Decameron, has not yet occurred in The Decline of the American Empire, but it hangs over the Montreal party like a dark cloud. In the first half of the film as the characters carelessly relate tales of casual group sex and S&M, there is an impending sense of doom. The gay character Claude laughs along with the other men about the STD’s their wives and lovers complain about (“Disease is a part of sex”), but privately agonizes in fear over the blood in his urine. When Claude tells of how he is often robbed while “cruising,” and a little later Dominique tells how she has also been robbed in foreign countries after sex with strangers, I felt uneasily that these intellectuals are living dangerously—that something is bound to go terribly wrong. But then, they know they are living dangerously—the uncertainty is part of what gives them pleasure. Diane, who is experimenting with sado-masochism with her brutish boyfriend, says of their connection, “We could kill each other.” When the sinister boyfriend shows up outside the house and eavesdrops on the men’s dirty stories, it seems as though the “real” thing has showed up and caught them at their game. He embodies the sense of foreboding I felt through the first half of the film. The characters seem so caught up in their dangerous pursuit of pleasure that they have lost any connection to each other. The women sneer at men’s small penises and their obsession over them. The men scoff at women’s desire for romance before sex. Remy delights in “knowing the dinner is on and stopping off on the way” or in “not mixing his sex life with his marriage.” The characters seem to constantly act out of disdain for each other.
However, Dominique’s revelation to the group of friends that she has slept with Remy and Pierre is somewhat of an anti-climatic moment---apocolypse has not happened—she’s just burst what she calls Louise’s self-delusional attempt to find happiness. The reappearance of the sinister boyfriend, ends not in a murder but in a cutting through all the p
retence: “They were talking about sex all day. I was expecting an orgy, but now the big deal is a fish pie. When I want sex, I fuck.” His declaration opens up the way for more confessions. Although in the segregated bravado found in the reversed role chatter (the men at home cooking while the women work out at the gym), the men and women seem to joy in putting down their spouses or lovers, glorying in the details of abstract sex, when the party comes back together, we see that there actually are strong emotional connections between them. Suddenly, the sexual talk becomes intellectualized and sentimental confessions are made. Pierre confesses that thes
e friends are his family. Dominique confesses that she has slept with Louise’s husband. Alone with the young PhD student Alain, Dominique confesses that she resents women with “cute little husband and cute little children, who don’t live in reality.” Pierre, who has spent all day boasting about his sexual exploits and his emotional disconnect from his lovers, confesses to his young companion Danielle that he loves her but that he is too tired for sex. The suddenly disillusioned Louise weeps herself to sleep in Claude’s arms, and Claude confesses to Diane that he is worried about the blood in his urine. Even Diane’s rough lover unexpectedly pulls out an absurd gift wrapped in heart-covered wrapping paper, attached to a bobbing heart-shaped balloon. The tough exterior bravado conceals a vulnerable desire for intimacy. The bluster of the day before fades away to reveal connections so deep that even after feeling betrayed, Louise finds herself unable to leave the house, instead joining Danielle to play a stormy piano duet. It was at this moment, that I realized what the piano music bursts at intervals throughout the film reminded me of. It reminded me of Jane Austen films—of those repressed stories of society and manners and the search for love—the house parties of young people who fight boredom by playing piano duets and proposing, as in Mansfield Park, bawdy plays to wile away the time. Perhaps the boredom that the characters express isn’t so new but is, in fact, built into the structure of the American/ European empire. Edward Said has noted that the genteel life Jane Austen describes in Mansfield Park would have been impossible without the slave plantations that Fanny’s uncle owned and the profits made from a budding British empire.[2] Patricia Rozema has further explored Austen’s references to the Caribbean in her film adaptation of the novel, delving into the wounded psyche of the eldest son Tom who has witnessed and sketched slaves being raped on his father’s plantation. Throughout The Decline of the American Empire are similar sexualized references to the “other”—which conceal objectifications of different races similar to that statement Fanny’s uncle makes in Rozema’s film that “mulatto women are like mules. They cannot reproduce.” Remy opens the film with leering references to a Vietnamese girl in his class. He catalogues the distinct pleasures and scents experienced when sleeping with women of various ethnicities. When the young Alain good-naturedly accuses him of being racist, Remy laughs that “there is no better friend to the Negro,” relating a time when he took a distinguished visiting professor from Burkina Faso on the hunt for prostitutes and tried to haggle the price down by claiming it would be “aid to Africa.” On the women’s side, Dominique smirks at what she sees as the social climbing of the two Martiniquean men she paid to sleep with her, and Diane maintains that she likes the “African blacks” better. These distinguished professors speak knowledgably about oppression and racism in South Africa; yet their academic concerns seem merely a sham (as Dominique theorizes on Marx and Freud) to cover their ravenous sexuality. That their racist sentiments slip out along with their tales of sexual escapades indicates that perhaps their identities are as much caught up in the ideologies of superiority, as Jane Austen’s characters. Since these characters are Quebecois who are themselves postcolonial figures, in the struggle against being incorporated into an “American empire,” their “colonial” language is doubly ironic. Even more than the unihibited sex talk, this need to define oneself against the “other” marks the fundamental weakness in their society.
[2] Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993
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