THE YEAR'S BEST ACTRESS.

CROZE, Marie-Josee; BARBARIAN Invasions, The (Film); FILM festivals; ARCAND, Denys; SODERBERGH, Steven, 1963-; RYAN, Meg, 1961-

CANNES (France); QUEBEC (Province); CANADA; FRANCE

This year's best actress sat cross-legged on a stool in a chic Montreal café while photographers and reporters swirled around her. Marie-Josée Croze remained an island of calm in the middle of it all. The company distributing "The Barbarian Invasions" (Les Invasions barbares), Denys Arcand's marvellous new film, couldn't afford to keep Croze in Cannes until the festival handed out its awards on May 25. So there she was, on a TV chat-show set in Montreal, when a jury including Steven Soderbergh and Meg Ryan named her the festival's best actress (and also named Arcand as its best screenwriter). In the New York Times, critic Elvis Mitchell called the movie a "melodrama on the Canadian health-care bureaucracy," but in some ways, it's even more specific to today's Montreal. Its bitter critique of Quebec's overcrowded hospitals would have cost the Parti Québécois even more seats if the film had opened before April's election. A panel of judges on Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio chose "Prochain épisode" by Hubert Aquin (translated by Sheila Fischman as Next Episode) as the book that everybody in Canada should make a point of reading this spring.