The Barbarian Invasions.

The Left, ever the, advocates of secular progress, has seen the future and it s looking, well, apocalyptic. Their new vision was brought home to me recently during a private screening of Denys Arcand's latest film The Barbarian Invasions which has since won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Many readers will be familiar with Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, which put him on the map as a major international filmmaker, in 1986. On the surface, a humorous look at the sexual antics of a group of Montreal intellectuals, the film was also read as a commentary on the failure of Quebec nationalists of Arcand's generation to see a mature, responsible nation into being.

Seventeen years later, Barbarian Invasions continues the story of the Decline characters with the central one, Remy, a washed-up university professor, now facing death from cancer at the same time as socialized medicine in Canada is also in its terminal stages.

At the screening, what Arcand wanted to talk about was his vision of where the world stands now. "We are now at the end of what was called West European civilisation, the civilisation that started with the Renaissance and ended in North America, in the US," he said.

On screen his characters laugh at the folly of their youth and decrepit middle age, decrying their Marxism, their socialism and their huge self-indulgence which, they now understand, ruined their own lives as well as those of their children.

The notion of barbarism is most clearly pursued in the simmering conflict between Remy and his son Sebastien, a super-rich, super-slick stock trader based in London, who is summoned by his mother, Louise, at the beginning of the film to attend to his dying father. Louise and Remy have long since split up--we learn that their marriage ended soon after his philandering was exposed at the end of Decline--and Sebastien resents his father for abandoning the family. In turn, R6my laments what he perceives as his son's philistinism and conspicuous consumption, which he considers barbaric.

Nevertheless, it is Sebastien alone who has what it takes to bring his suffering father comfort. It is Sebastien who orchestrates those final weeks--looking after his father's health care, assembling his old group of friends at the lake house where Decline took place, and organising his father's assisted suicide--all with quiet practicality and humanistic logic.

"Surely, the hospital system can't possibly be that bad!" one British critic challenged Arcand after the final credits rolled. The critic was referring to the opening scenes of moan ing patients lying on gurneys in hallways while unions impede treatment and entire hospital wings lie empty. "Surely a man like that would have access to private doctors at least."

"Oh, but it is that bad," Arcand shot back. "While people extol Canada's health system, few realise that private health care is now illegal in Canada and the public system is collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy."

The film is also rich with telling scenes such as the one where an old priest takes an auctioneer through a vast warehouse of religious statues, paintings and ecclesiastical plate. The auctioneer tells the priest that older, better items are available in Europe, which means that there is no market for his 'art'. "They're worthless then?" the priest sighs as the camera closes in on the unblinking eyes of plaster statues.

The reason for such obsolescence? In 1966, Quebec churches suddenly emptied, one character declares. Arcand concurs: 'Anyone who knows Quebec knows the churches are all but empty." Nor can he see a future.

To him, the trajectory of the postmodern world has gone as far as it can go. From art to zookeeping, all is bankrupt. The Western world is in its last days, he thinks, and this was made manifest September 11, stunning shots of which have been inserted into his film.

"We are heading back towards the Middle Ages," Arcand says. "We're fighting the infidels, the Muslims. But the Muslims think of us as barbarians too. It depends on what side of the fence you're on."

Such sentiments are echoed in Angels in America, a six-hour HBO extravaganza recently televised here. Though the series initially appeared as homage to the new homosexual era, it eventually dawns that this is an apocalyptic portrait of postmodern America suffering a disease so deep, so auto-immune, that the nation may not recover.

On the surface the disease is AIDS, which kills its victims by steadily destroying the immune system--that is, it knocks out the safety mechanisms within the body which throw off illness and death. In the same way, the Western world has been dismantling its own immune system, which is the natural law, by trying to overthrow it.

"The state of America (read the West) is now so bad that a flood isn't enough!" one distressed woman, whose husband has just revealed that he is gay, wails at the New York skyline, its Twin Towers obscured in fog. "This calls for fire!" Another character, an AIDS victim, sees it differently. He blames God for the personal and the national distress of his country. "God has abandoned us," he howls. "He should be sued!"

But here, as in Barbarian Invasions, it's the optics that are wrong. The Western world may be in terminal decline, but not because God has abandoned us. Rather, it is because we have abandoned God, the source of all love, liberty and life. Thus it follows, as the night follows the day, that hate, slavery and death naturally and logically ensue.