Idea 21 for 2025: Are We the Barbarians?

A few weeks ago, I saw Julie Delpy’s satirical and intriguing film Les Barbares (Meet the Barbarians).

The word “barbarian,” importantly, is an ancient and modern signifier of the uncivilized, savage Other; indeed, it comes from ancient Greek, where the Greeks called everyone else but themselves barbaros.

Set in the Breton village of Paimpont, it describes what happens when a well-intentioned community that the refugees that they had sponsored and promised were not coming from Ukraine, but Syria.

Whatever the Bretons imagined the cultural gulf to be between their ancient and cloistered village and the Ukrainian refugees they sought, we are encouraged to believe that this gulf is more of chasm when the Syrian family, composed of two parents, two children, a sister and a stepfather, arrive. As spectators, we are primed to take the point of view of the Bretons and their generalizations of Syrians, Arabs, Muslims, and Others, all entangled together in relative ignorance. We are, of course, familiar with these imaginaries, and we are not surprised with the mainly comedic, occasionally violent xenophobic and racist sentiments espoused by various villagers, including a prominent member of the village council.

Yet, what Delpy provides us beyond simple ethnocentrism and Us vs Them polarization, is a picture of the different but still understandable collective humanism of the Syrian family members and the Breton villagers. The Syrian family, despite lived experiences of trauma, forced separation of other family members, including a brother/uncle who stayed back to take up armed resistance, are markedly realistic and pragmatic, save for the youngest, a son, who misses his uncle, and wants to return home.

Indeed, the notion of home is significant. While the Syrian family face obstacles in finding a home of their own, which the parent/father, a trained architect, can help design and build, the villagers have to make room in their small village with their set ways for Others.

Delpy is a primary school teacher in the village. She has cast herself as the activist who pushed for the invitation of refugees is a leader in this regard. For others, there are living other everyday struggles, including infidelity, as well as cross-cultural adolescent heterosexual romance between one of the Paimpont youths and the daughter in the Syrian family.

In the end, there are a few pivotal scenes where we begin to question and blur the Us vs Them divide. One involves the scene when the racist councillor’s wife goes into labour at the beach, and their baby is delivered by the sister/aunt, who was a trained doctor in Syria, and for whom the baby is named. The other is when the stepfather helps the owner and cook of a crêperie, which even the locals recognize as producing terrible crepes, improve the quality and range of the crêpes. Indeed, it’s a vignette of the newcomer, the stranger, adopting and adapting to the host culture and improving it.

It's the last scene, where we see Delpy realize her calling and purpose: she has gone to work in a UN refugee camp presumably in the Middle East. In a significant way, it harks backs to the title of the film, and asking if we are indeed, as the relatively privileged in a horrifying world order, are the barbarians are all.