Thanks for the review of "We Don't." It looks like a smart film, one I'm hoping to catch before it leaves Atlanta. I also enjoy those dialogue-heavy films, but they are very difficult to do well.
I've also been planning to see "Barbarian Invasions" for some time for some of the reasons you describe. You're right that intellectuals are much more likely to appear in Canadian, or to be honest non-Hollywood, films.
I think it was the NYTimes review of We Don't Live Here Anymore that said that the Dubus stories were originally from the 70s, and commented on the same dated feeling that you note.
I thought about reading Austen ... I read and reread JA back in the day. No more, since I now read trash (ha!), non-fiction or more recent fiction. (Can't get into anything pre-1940. No idea why. 1990 or later is best.)
Well, Quebecois -- especially Quebecois of that age, the ones who ushered in the Quiet Revolution, the ones who engineered the defeat of the church, the ones who made Quebec, in large part, what it is today (the cities, anyhow) -- tend towards intellecutalism. It's in part a response to the Catholic Church as it was until then. The only person who seemed particularly incongrous was the son: there are just very few right-wing francophones here.
It was a good movie. Quebecois cinema often is. I had issues with the subtitles (in parts, in other parts it was brilliant); I wonder where they were destined for (clearly not Montrealers) and I'm curious about whether that was the actual wording used on the English tracks.
I saw the subtitled version -- and I agree, there were a lot of gaps between titles and the dialogue (my aural French was good enough to catch the gap and sometimes even understand the French, although there were spots I couldn't follow)
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