A Christmas Tale
Don't call it a downer: This acid wash of cancer, estrangement, and secreted longing was the surprise feel-good film of last year's winter crop
Reviewed by Kimberley Jones, Fri., Dec. 18, 2009
A Christmas Tale
Criterion, $39.95Don't call it a downer: This acid wash of cancer, estrangement, and secreted longing was the surprise feel-good film of last year's winter crop. In Arnaud Desplechin's radiant dysfunctional-family film, we witness holidays on black ice, where drama, trauma, and fisticuffs lurk in unlikely places. But then, so, too, can fiercely funny and heartfelt stuff be found ferreted away in the film's nooks and crannies: "In Arnaud's film, usually when people say that they hate each other, it's a love scene," explains star Mathieu Amalric in "Arnaud's Tale," a new, 35-minute, English-language documentary packaged on Criterion's two-disc set. (Also included is L'aimée, Desplechin's moving 2007 documentary about the sale of his family home in Roubaix, the provincial northern town in which A Christmas Tale is set.) In "Arnaud's Tale," Desplechin explains the fascinating layering of inspirations that galvanized the film, starting with the American model of Thanksgiving movies. (He never specifies which ones, but we get a special kick out of imagining that supercool, chain-smoking Gaul curling up to the cuddlebomb of The Family Stone; the two films share a similar mom-with-cancer/kids-returning-to-the-roost plot.) Desplechin also cites Emerson's memoirs, which provide the striking quotation of the film's graveside opening, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, which closes the film with Puck's "If we shadows have offended ..." and is alluded to throughout via Mendelssohn's opera, Max Reinhardt's 1935 film, and mirroring plot points.
"Puckish" may very well be the word for A Christmas Tale; certainly its impish sense of play spins the film's melodramatic trapping on its head. Catherine Deneuve is the cancer-stricken family matriarch, Junon Vuillard (as in the mighty Juno, one of many mix-and-match allusions). Junon is built like some gorgeous bulwark, resisting too much overt affection from or toward her three grown children. A fourth child – technically, the first – died at the age of six from the same disease that's afflicting Junon. Curiously, that's the same number of years surviving son Henri (Amalric) has been in exile, banished from the family for an undisclosed reason; his donor-compatibility is the only reason he's allowed back in the door for a fractious family Christmas.
If exile sounds like something out of a storybook, then, you're on the right track. Desplechin and co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu steep the film in fairy-tale iconography, including voice-over narration, chapter heads, puppetry, peephole lensing, even a mythic beast in the basement. These flourishes deepen rather than diminish A Christmas Tale's emotional impact, maybe because the destabilizing effect of so many ideas and aesthetics tumbled together has rendered us more vulnerable, more tender to the touch. (Or maybe simply because the thing is majestically shot and performed, top to bottom?) Wintry title aside, this is a solar flare of a film – a dazzling, animate, inexplicable wonder.