L‘ÂGE DES TÉNÈBRES

Director: Denys Arcand
Cast: Denys Arcand, Marc Labrèche, Sylvie Leonard, Diane Kruger, Emma de Caunes, Thierry Ardisson, Laurent Baffie, Paule Baillargeon
Run Time: 104 min.
Country: Canada
Language: French with English subtitles
Rating: Not yet rated

The third film in the unofficial trilogy begun with LE DÉCLIN DE L‘EMPIRE AMÉRICAIN (1986) and LES INVASIONS BARBARES (2003), L‘ÂGES DES TÉNÈBRES is the newest feature from acclaimed Quebecois director Denis Arcand. The film – a Gala Presenta-tion at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival® and the closing night offering at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival – features the signature blend of comedy, slapstick, tragedy and incisive social commentary that has unified Arcand‘s filmmaking and made him a favourite of cinephiles around the world.

Jean-Marc Leblanc (played by popular Quebec television star Marc Labrèche) is a civil servant desperately unsatisfied in his daily life. He has an indifferent wife, two daughters who ignore him and a terrifically frustrating job at the fictionalized bureaucracy of the Citizen‘s Rights Department – which sticks him at a desk in a relocated office inside a stadium. He is, however, an incurable dreamer and takes to disappearing into an elaborate fantasy life where he is free to be famous, suave and sought-after; he adopts the roles of mythic hero, successful author, famed actor and, above all, irresistible lover. Increasingly, however, his real life keeps losing out to the dream world and the possibility arises that Jean-Marc‘s reality will drift away completely. At the same time, his daydreams present their own problems, especially when his dream women begin to object to Jean-Marc‘s ineffectuality, and complain about always wind-ing up in losers‘ fantasies.

Arcand‘s film owes much to the past masters of French cinema but, but Jean-Marc‘s ramblings through an indifferent social land-scape have been brilliantly updated for the twenty-first century, a world of iPods, sweeping epidemics and mandatory motivational lectures. Featuring fabulous performances – including those by Diane Kruger and Emma de Caunes as the unruly temptresses of Jean-Marc‘s make-believe double life – L‘ ÂGES DES TÉNÈBRES is another stellar work of deadpan social criticism from a true master.

“Though it also applies to many other countries than just Canada, Arcand's portrait of politically correct government life in Quebec is especially acrid …” – Derek Elley, Variety