Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

calvinnme This is a very well done French-Canadian film about eight friends meeting for a dinner party out in the country. Three middle-aged men and a one young man are already at the manor where the dinner will take place, preparing the meal and discussing their sex lives. The remaining party guests, three middle-aged women and one young woman, are spending the day at the gym, exercising and discussing their sex lives.Eventually they meet up at the country manor for dinner, and the conversation continues. While this may sound like not much happens, the film is never boring, and the direction by Denys Arcand keeps the viewer visually interested. I'm also keeping the character descriptions purposely vague, as their relationships to one another are revealed slowly as the film progresses. The dialogue is frank, funny and sharp, and all eight characters are fully-drawn human beings. I especially like the notion that these eight characters who seem to speak non-stop and at times overshare in the extreme, can't seem to honestly communicate when it matters most in their lives.The title refers to a historical adage that when members of a given society begin to think about their own individual happiness above every other concern, that society is doomed. The characters' romantic navel-gazing and at times destructive pursuit of happiness seems to signal our own societal sunset. But don't let that heavy thought steer you away from the film, as it's brilliantly acted and well worth a look.The sequel, "The Barbarian Invasions", made 17 years later, is also very worthwhile.

Michael Terceiro I really did not like this movie. It was pretentious and quite tedious. I don't think I liked one single character in the entire movie. The story involves a bunch of academics who hand around a holiday house (the men) and gym (the women) talking about sex. The two groups end up coming together at the holiday house and talking more about sex. As you can imagine nobody has anything particularly uplifting to say about the topic of sex, focusing more on serial infidelity.I guess one could argue that the whole point of the movie was to ridicule the main characters to demonstrate the decline of the American empire, but I don't think the director achieved that.Also watching a movie like this with subtitles is hard work because the movie is very wordy. I found it hard to keep up with the constant rush of words at the bottom of the screen.

Polaris_DiB History and experience over the past couple of decades has shown us that intellectuals talking about sex is about the unsexiest and unintellectual thing anyone can do, but this wasn't quite as obvious back in 1986. Basically, the idea in this film is that these characters insatiable drive to find comfort, security, and pleasure in sexual acts is actually the unhealthy motive that makes them so unbearable to themselves--which they hide from themselves with more sex. This drive is linked to "the decline of the American Empire", as expressed in an early interview within the movie.So the idea is that relatively detestable people talk about sex, and that that talk is supposed to reveal how detestable they are as people. Arcand at least keeps giving it drive and momentum by doing interesting things with the camera such as isolating most of the characters in single frames, revealing their ultimate loneliness, and cutting rapidly between them, showing how they are more at war with each other than they are at agreement. And to give Arcand credit, this is pretty much what intellectual life is, a constant struggle with other intellectuals to stand out, even when everyone knows that standing out means standing alone.But yeah, the characters and action are unsexy and kind of pathetic. I think this film is much more an aspect of its time than it is something meant to last, which makes it kind of dated. It's also the exact type of mental buffing in dialog and references to people like Susan Sontag that makes art-house films so unpopular around the populist entertainment moviegoers. In all, I'll take it anyway--it has its place basically among the exact type of people the characters are--it's just that it's not really interesting or important to anyone who isn't those characters.--PolarisDiB

MartinHafer I had a VERY hard time sitting through this film. Unless you really are very pro-adultery and like to hear people ENDLESSLY talking about their sexual exploits, I can't see how you could enjoy this film. Geez--most of the main characters behaved like rutting weasels and their bragging about their MANY infidelities grew tiresome. About the only element of this I appreciated was the DISGUSTING scene where the one character was urinating and blood was splattering everywhere because he'd picked up an STD---BIG SURPRISE!?! Hmm.If you want a GOOD film, watch the sequel, Barbarian Invasions. Despite the general unlikable nature of many of the characters, the sequel is VERY involving and more realistic--well worth your time.