A Christmas Tale

By
Heidi
 – November 26, 2010Posted in: Columns, Rogue Cinema

” My son is dead. I looked inside myself and realized that I felt no grief. Suffering is a painted backdrop. Tears bring me no nearer to the world. My son fell from me like a leaf from a tree and I’ve lost nothing. Joseph is now my founder. This loss is my foundation. Joseph has made of me his son. And I feel boundless joy.”

-Abel Vuillard

A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) is Arnaud Desplechin’s exuberant exploration of the joys, resentments and difficulties threaded through family relationships. Some films leave you with a feeling that you have experienced something solid and illuminating that will stay with you.  A Christmas Tale (released in 2008), with its dream cast, rich characters and blend of humor and big ideas,  is such a film for me. Every time I watch it, I like it more and I’m even more amazed by the strange alchemy Desplechin uses to create his moving, joyful, but unsentimental family drama.

The film opens with a narrator revealing the family back-story as though it were in a children’s storybook: In the early 1960s, Abel and Junon Vuillard, give birth to two children, Joseph and Elizabeth. Joseph has a rare genetic condition, and only a bone marrow transplant can save him. But Abel and Junon, as well as Elizabeth, are incompatible. And so the couple conceive a third child, Henri — but his marrow doesn’t match either and Joseph dies 18 months later, at 6. The couple then have a fourth child, Ivan. As A Christmas Tale moves forward to the present day, we learn how each member of the Vuillard family has been shaped by that early loss.

Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) is a successful playwright, living in Paris. But for some reason — one that’s never really explained — her relationship with her brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric) has hardened into hatred. When Henri goes bankrupt as the result of a bad business deal and some bad behavior on his part, Elizabeth agrees to bail him out, on one condition: He is to have no more contact with her, ever.

The Vuillard family reluctantly goes along with this banishment, and Henri essentially disappears from their lives for six years. And then Junon (Catherine Deneuve) learns that she has a rare leukemia, the disease that took her firstborn son. And so she and her husband, Abel (the charming comic actor Jean-Paul Roussillon), look for a bone-marrow donor within the family as they all gather for the Christmas holiday.

Although the film continually circles back to the conflict between Henri and Elizabeth and Junon’s illness, the film is populated with a rich cast of supporting characters. There’s also Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the youngest and most easy-going Vuillard, who’s married to Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter); together, they have two sons. Simon (Laurent Capelluto), Junon’s nephew — the Vuillards took him in after the death of his own parents — is also part of the family core; he’s the one family member who has maintained contact with everyone, including Henri. Simon is also hopelessly in love with Sylvia. Finally, as Henri makes his reappearance within the family, he brings a girlfriend with him: Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), who watches the tangled family events with detachment, a smile always playing on her lips.

Junon’s ruthless practicality and steely resilience has ensured the family’s success and survival, but left them fragile. Still, there is no question of the Vuillard’s affection for each other. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, Junon and Henri steal outside to share a smoke. Henri asks, “Still don’t love me?” to which she replies, “I never did,” the spikiness betraying a deep tenderness between them.

Stylistically, Desplechin tries everything  — characters talk to the camera as though they are being interviewed, another reads a letter out with a photographic backdrop behind them, the camera zooming in on the actor’s face, Junon’s cancer cells are seen dividing and spreading through her blood while ominous, melodramatic music plays in the background, music swells in and out mixing Charles Mingus with rap, we find ourselves in a Technicolor montage straight out of an MGM musical and then return to intimate vignettes of family life — Abel giving his grandsons a bath, the family enjoying fireworks in the garden — and naturalistic dialogue-laden scenes that would be at home in any Woody Allen movie.

At times, it feels that the movie will fly apart, scattered by the disparate elements that Desplechin employs. But the film, anchored by the brilliantly acted, richly drawn characters remains a cohesive whole, which feels like a miracle that the audience has been privileged to witness. The intricacy of Desplechin’s style reflects the complexity of family life in a way that mimics felt reality. All at once we feel the comfort, warmth and suffocation of spending the holidays together. We see Henri’s charm, but also the way he drives everyone crazy. We see both Elizabeth’s coldness and her fragility. Desplechin does not offer ‘lessons learned’ or catharsis, but the result is no less affirming.   Instead he seems to be saying:   This is life, in all of its messy imperfect glory: and it is just as it should be.

For a taste of Desplechin’s magic, view the trailer here.


NEXT WEEK: Heather is in full cinematic mode here, as she shares her interpretation of  ‘The Visitor’ (2007).  For a more extended schedule,  check in here.

Tags: , ,