The cinema of Arnaud Desplechin is a literary one, insofar
as his sprawling, multi-character, usually family-oriented films seek a
richness, complexity, and scope reminiscent of grand novels. A Christmas Tale is no different, a
drama about the holiday gathering of the Vuillard family that’s at once quite
confined in terms of focus, and yet wide-ranging with regards to both its
narrative concerns and emotions. Co-written with Emmanuel Bourdieu (with whom
the director also collaborated on Esther
Kahn), Desplechin’s opus is, in terms of basic subject matter, rather
conventional, as it’s a star-studded Christmas saga in which a fractured family
reunites under the shadow of their matriarch’s impending death. Junon
(Catherine Deneuve) is dying of a rare cancer that can only be treated through
a painful (and potentially lethal) bone marrow transplant from a matching
donor, of which she has two: her grandson Paul (Emile Berling), recently out of
a psych hospital after a breakdown, and her middle child Henri (Mathieu
Amalric), a reckless, selfish prick estranged from the family for six years
thanks to a decree by his elder sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny). Their
gathering rekindles old tensions as well as sparks a few new ones, which also
come to involve younger brother Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), his wife Sylvia (Chiara
Mastroianni), cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto), and dad Abel (Jean-Paul
Roussillon), a bevy of characters whose motivations and feelings for each other
are intricate and contradictory, sometimes to the point of obscurity. Such mild
inscrutability is occasionally trying, yet the cumulative effect of
Desplechin’s plotting – in which myriad sentiments and relationships are tied
up like a Christmas present bow – is to force constant, pressing engagement
with his story. As such, A Christmas Tale’s
expansive stew of physical and psychological illness, death, betrayal, longing,
religion, and ritual ultimately proves invigoratingly lush, a work of outsized
ambition that, enlivened by Desplechin’s deft melding of the grand and the
intimate, leaves one feeling, as all Christmas films should, pleasurably
stuffed.
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