The Dying Art of Joie De Vivre.

BARBARIAN Invasions, The (Film); DECLINE of the American Empire, The (Film); ARCAND, Denys; FILMMAKERS; MOTION picture industry; CANADIANS

QUEBEC (Province); CANADA

This article presents a profile of Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand. "I have no imagination." Denys Arcand is explaining why he called the police to ask where he might find some smack. The Quebec filmmaker was researching his script for "The Barbarian Invasions," in which a wealthy young broker procures heroin as a pain reliever for his father, who's dying of cancer. Arcand wondered how his character would go about that. So he called the RCMP. Soon he was sitting across from a pair of hardened drug squad officers, a man and a woman, in an interrogation room with two-way mirrors -- a scene very close to one that would end up in his movie. The Mounties told him everything he wanted to know about junk. I' m sitting with Arcand at a Montreal bistro adorned with irreverent caricatures of Roman Catholic clergy. Arcand, 62, is the dean of French Canadian filmmakers. No one has portrayed modern Quebec with a sharper eye, while touching on themes that resonate with an international audience. It offers a rare mix of intellectual and emotional heft. In the course of a comedy that eases into elegiac drama, Arcand delivers satirical broadsides against our tattered health-care system, the demise of the sexual revolution, the failed ideological fashions of the '60s, the death of literacy, and history's amnesia about New World genocide.