It is a well-worn adage in cinema that the third film in a series is often the one that breaks it. This curse of the trilogy, familiar from blockbuster franchises, proves equally applicable to more rarefied arthouse fare, as demonstrated by celebrated Canadian auteur Denys Arcand’s concluding chapter to his loosely connected thematic triptych. Three decades after the incisive, talkative The Decline of the American Empire (1986) and its Oscar-winning, emotionally potent sequel The Barbarian Invasions (2003), Arcand delivered L’Âge des ténèbres in 2007. Translated as “The Age of Darkness” or “The Dark Age”, it was marketed in English-speaking territories as Days of Darkness—a title that caused minor confusion with an unrelated American zombie film released the same year—and sometimes as The Age of Ignorance. Whatever its name, the film is a profound disappointment, a muddled and misanthropic coda that squanders the intellectual legacy and human insight of its illustrious predecessors.
The film functions as a sequel largely through a threadbare connective tissue: the brief reappearance of Pierre (Pierre Curzi), the university professor from the earlier films, who now appears only to lament his financial ruin due to divorce. His listener is the new protagonist, Jean-Marc Leblanc (Marc Labrèche), a junior functionary in the Quebec provincial government. Jean-Marc is a man besieged by modern futility. Professionally, he is powerless to help the citizens who approach his office, while being perpetually bullied by his superior, Carole Bigras-Bourque (Caroline Néron). Domestically, he is adrift: his wife Sylvie (Sylvie Léonard) has left for Toronto to pursue a real estate career, leaving him to manage their two daughters, the eldest of whom is caught performing fellatio on neighbourhood boys. The terminal illness of his mother (Françoise Graton) compounds his despair. In response, Jean-Marc retreats into an elaborate fantasy life, populated by beautiful women including a film star played by Diane Kruger. This premise, blending mundane tragedy with Walter Mitty-esque escape, seems fertile ground for Arcand’s brand of satirical observation. Yet, the execution falters from the outset.
A signature of Arcand’s trilogy has been the ironic juxtaposition of grand historical epochs with the banal lives of contemporary Quebecois. The Decline of the American Empire framed its characters’ sexual preoccupations within a thesis of civilisational decay, while The Barbarian Invasions used the post-9/11 “clash of civilisations” as a backdrop for an intimate story of death and reconciliation. The historical titles were a clever transposition of banal, pretentious middle-class academic chatter onto the grand chapters of history. In Days of Darkness, this conceit collapses. There is no compelling connection between Jean-Marc’s petty bureaucratic miseries and the concept of a societal “Dark Age.” Arcand’s script gestures weakly at pseudohistorical parallels, most notably in scenes where characters don face masks during a SARS outbreak—a detail that seems chillingly prophetic post-COVID but feels like a isolated, opportunistic visual rather than a integrated thematic device. The reference to the 6th-century Plague of Justinian is an intellectual footnote, not a sustaining metaphor. The title thus becomes an empty, pretentious label, lacking the resonant critique that animated the earlier films.
Instead of a coherent historical analogy, Arcand offers a scattershot array of satirical targets and tonal shifts that result in a film utterly lacking in focus. The most glaring example is an extended, costly sequence depicting a medieval jousting tournament in which Jean-Marc participates. This spectacle, the film’s largest set piece, feels bizarrely disconnected from the narrative, a whimsical detour that serves no clear purpose beyond showcasing production design. It epitomises the film’s structural failure. The narrative is further fragmented by Jean-Marc’s fantasy vignettes, which range from mildly amusing to tiresomely self-indulgent, and by Arcand’s broadside satirical jabs. These targets are myriad: the nightmarish inefficiency of modern bureaucracy, Orwellian “political correctness” in speech codes, the absurdity of speed dating, the lingering spectre of Quebec separatism, and the vacuous cult of celebrity. The latter is ironically underscored by cameos from real-life celebrities like Donald Sutherland playing themselves. While Arcand’s earlier work succeeded by weaving its critiques into the characters’ conversations and lives, here the satire feels tacked-on and desperate, a checklist of grievances rather than a unified vision.
Compounding this lack of focus is a profoundly misanthropic outlook that alienates the audience. Jean-Marc is not merely hapless; he is portrayed as a bad husband, a neglectful father, and an incompetent civil servant. There is little attempt to generate empathy for his plight. The people surrounding him are equally shallow and unsympathetic, caricatures of bureaucratic pettiness, familial discord, or urban alienation. The sole exception is Jean-Marc’s dying mother, whose hospitalisation and death provide the film’s only moment of genuine pathos and facilitate a clumsy shift from light comedy to serious drama—a structural echo of the emotional turns in The Decline and The Barbarian Invasions. Her passing prompts Jean-Marc’s eventual rejection of his old life; he abandons his job and home, finding rustic solace in a lakeside cabin where he supports himself as a gardener. This conclusion aims for redemption but feels unearned, a sentimental cop-out after nearly two hours of relentless cynicism.
Technically, Arcand’s direction is not without merit. He handles some sequences with skill, particularly those that blur the lines between Jean-Marc’s drab reality and his vivid fantasies, creating a Felliniesque mix of the mundane and the surreal. The visual concept of the provincial bureaucracy commandeering the vast, decaying venues of the 1976 Montreal Olympics is a brilliantly absurd image that captures a specific Quebecois institutional malaise. However, these flashes of inspiration are undermined by episodes of extreme self-indulgence. The film opens with a protracted sequence featuring Canadian musician Rufus Wainwright performing an aria from Zémire et Azor, 18th Century opera by André Grétry, during which he briefly morphs into Jean-Marc. It is a conceptually heavy-handed and alienating opening. This is followed by a fantasy scene with a nude Diane Kruger that includes a meta-commentary on American puritanical censorship—a moment that, while arguably the film’s high point in terms of audacity, also highlights the subsequent creative decline. The score, much like the intrusive and overly melodramatic music criticised in The Decline of the American Empire, often works against the film’s tone.
Unsurprisingly, this confused and bitter film was met with dismissive reviews upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, a far cry from the triumphant reception of The Barbarian Invasions at the same venue years prior. Arcand was compelled to recut the film into multiple versions for subsequent distribution, a tell-tale sign of a project without a confident core. The recut version found only modest commercial success in Quebec, largely attributable to lead actor Marc Labrèche’s popularity on television, not to the film’s inherent qualities.
Days of Darkness is the unfortunate proof of the trilogy curse. It lacks the sharp, ensemble-driven dialogue and sexual politics of The Decline, and utterly misses the profound emotional resonance and generational insight of The Barbarian Invasions. Where those films used their historical frameworks to illuminate the human condition, Days of Darkness offers only a disconnected series of skits and grievances, wrapped in a misanthropic glaze. It is a film that feels like the work of an artist who has exhausted his sympathy for his subjects, resulting in a tedious and ultimately forgettable conclusion to a once-distinguished series.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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