A CHRISTMAS TALE
by
Chris Dashiell
Arnaud Desplechin practices cinematic cubism. His movies
show many different sides of people rather than just one or two. He
is also not averse to letting a film’s technique call attention
to itself—his array of flamboyant techniques are more than the
means of conveying a story; they are an essential part of the content.
I thus found it rather surprising that he would choose such a bland
title for his latest picture: Un conte de Noël, or as
it’s titled here in the U.S., A Christmas Tale.
As if we needed another one! In fact, the story takes place during the
Christmas season, it’s about a large family, and it even involves
a mother who has cancer. Sound familiar? Fortunately, it’s not,
and I suspect that Desplechin set out to make the Christmas movie that
breaks all the Christmas movie rules.
The
story concerns the Vuillards, a family with a troubled history. Catherine
Deneuve plays the matriarch Junon, cool and self-possessed, and Jean-Paul
Rousillon plays her husband, a wise old man who looks a bit like a leprechaun.
Their oldest child, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), is a depressed yet successful
playwright. The middle child, Henri (Mathieu Amalric), got in trouble
mismanaging his father’s money, and Elizabeth stepped forward
with the funds to keep him from going 
to
jail—but on one condition, that Henri be banished from the family
and not allowed near her or the parental home. The reasons for her hatred
of her brother are mysterious and form one of the major plot strands
of the film. Then there’s Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the relatively
well-adjusted baby of the family, and his mother’s favorite. The
family is also haunted by the death at age four of the first son, Joseph.
Junon got pregnant with Henri in hopes that the new baby would have
the right blood type to save Joseph. He didn’t, and she never
forgave him.
We
learn all this almost immediately, which indicates how rapidly Desplechin
can convey a complex narrative. But there are lots more characters,
including Ivan’s wife Sylvia, played by Chiara Mastroianni (Deneuve’s
daughter in real life), Elizabeth’s suicidal son Paull (Emile
Berling), and even a cousin (Laurent Capelluto) who once carried a torch
for Sylvia. At all events, Junon needs a bone marrow transplant, the
errant son Henri is compatible, and so he returns from banishment with
his girlfriend Faunia (Emmanuele Devos), who represents a fresh spirit
of sanity in the midst of family chaos.
The
style is similar to Desplechin's great movie Kings
and Queen from a few years ago, in that the editing
seems to have the fluidity of thought. Each person gets his or her time
in the spotlight, while thereby illuminating different aspects and relationships
within the family. Different scenes and characters will have their own
music—the film sometimes cutting back and forth between, for instance,
a peppy jazz score and a dark classical sound in the same sequence.
The director’s playful style includes jump cuts, chapter headings,
and a host of apparent non sequiturs, visual and verbal. The extensive
use of the iris (a technique associated mainly with the silent film)
exemplifies the picture’s free-spirited tone. The humor, however,
is not of the “heart warming” variety. The screenplay (by
Desplechin and frequent collaborator Emmanuel Bourdieu) stubbornly resists
sentimentality. People are many-sided, many-layered, and contradictory.
There are no endings, happy or otherwise.
The
return of Henri, it turns out, is the catalyst for a series of schemes,
regrets, and opportunities. The versatile Amalric is often center stage,
in a performance of agreeable eccentricity, his character’s unpredictable
behavior provoking chain reactions in the family. A lesser film might
make him a hero, and his traumatized sister an antagonist, but Desplechin
takes us to unexpected places with his darting sensibility and willingness
to veer off into passages of pure poetry or philosophy, which nevertheless
are human-sized enough to make perfect sense within the story. Despite
its title, A Christmas Tale is a story of all seasons, embracing
the richness (and the darkness) of life.
©2008 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
