Underplayed Gems

The Decline of the American Empire (1986)

The Decline of the American Empire poster
Original title
Le Déclin de l'empire américain
Directed by
Denys Arcand
Genre
drama film, comedy film, LGBTQ-related film
Country
Canada
Runtime
1h 41m
Rated
15+
Rating
6.7 of 10 from 176 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

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How it feels

A group of university history professors get together for dinner and talk openly about their sexual lives and relationships. Their conversations reveal their personal hypocrisies and connect their self-indulgence to a broader sense of social decay.

wittytalkativeprovocativesexually frankintellectualconversationaldrollsobering

What happens

The Decline of the American Empire (French: Le Déclin de l'empire Américain) is a 1986 Canadian sex comedy-drama film directed by Denys Arcand and starring Rémy Girard, Pierre Curzi and Dorothée Berryman. The film follows a group of intellectual friends from the University of Montreal history department as they engage in a long dialogue about their sexual affairs, touching on issues of adultery, homosexuality, group sex, BDSM and prostitution. A number of characters associate self-indulgence with societal decline. The film was a box office success in Canada and internationally and received good reviews. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, nine Genie Awards, including Best Motion Picture, and was the first Canadian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film won the People's Choice Award at the 11th Toronto International Film Festival. It was followed by two sequels, The Barbarian Invasions in 2003 and Days of Darkness in 2007. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

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