'A Christmas Tale'
MOVIE REVIEW
Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric help director Arnaud Desplechin bring a family drama situation to astonishing life.
Nothing can sound more familiar, or more banal, than the subject of "A Christmas Tale," yet nothing could be more energizing, more captivating, more pure pleasure on screen than the passionate, evocative experience that has resulted.
It is Christmas weekend in the French provincial town of Roubaix, and three generations of a family are gathering under one roof to, yes, celebrate the holiday and endure each other. It's a family melodrama situation that has been done and overdone every which way but loose, but stifle those yawns: In the hands of writer-director Arnaud Desplechin this moribund conception comes to vivid and astonishing life.
Full credit for making the kind of film Hollywood would produce if it had the nerve, or the strength, goes to filmmaker Desplechin, highly regarded in France for films like "Kings and Queen" and "My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument," but not as widely known here as he should be.
The gifted Desplechin, as "Christmas Tale" demonstrates, is drawn to powerful emotions and has a passion for finding new ways to tell stories, ways that expand the envelope of what is possible within the boundaries of traditional narrative.
What results is a captivating portrait of the most gorgeously fractious dysfunctional family. All the love and hostility, warmth and mistrust that inevitably flow from family functions is on display, as is the often maddening, always inexplicable complexity of the human nature we all share.
In achieving all this the director is helped mightily by his superb cast, engaged actors who fully embody their roles and who include such well-known names as Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" as well as the current "Quantum of Solace"), Emmanuelle Devos ("The Beat That My Heart Skipped") and Chiara Mastroianni.
The actors in turn were energized by Desplechin's magnificent script, which not only has structural surprises but also displays the zest for self-aware language, for soaring verbal arias, that characterizes the best of the filmmaker's work.
"A Christmas Tale" begins with a brisk recap of Vuillard family history, focusing on the decades-past death of the family's eldest son, Joseph, from leukemia.
Now father Abel (Comédie-Française veteran Jean-Paul Roussillon) and mother Junon (Deneuve) are unsettled by the news that Junon herself has been struck by the same disease. A bone marrow transplant is her only chance, but as her three children and eldest grandson are tested to find out who is compatible, they are chastened by the knowledge that the transplant might end up killing instead of saving her.
