Christmas Tale, A (The Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)
APPROX. 152 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2008 - MPA RATING: NR
" There’s something intoxicating about the film’s treatment of its unpleasant characters
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Joining "Silent Night, Deadly Night" and "Bad Santa" in the Yuletide Cheer section of your video store is Arnaud Desplechin´s "A Christmas Tale" (2008).
The upper class Vuillard family is structured around the absence of its firstborn child, Joseph, who died of leukemia at age six. In the forty plus years since, the family has fractured along fault lines straddling all sides of his grave. The family members´ complex reactions to the inciting trauma cross the board. Middle child Henri (Mathieu Amalric), stigmatized from birth because he and his incompatible blood were of "no use" to save his older brother, is lazy, spiteful and boorish. Oldest child Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) directs her anger both inward (in the form of depression) and outward at Henri who she despises with a pure, white-hot intensity. Little brother Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) is gentler and more passive than his siblings, taking after his father Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), the family patriarch whose amiability renders him largely irrelevant.
At the center of the storm and of the family is mother Junon, played by Catherine Deneuve in another permutation of her ice queen persona. Junon defies all standard definitions of maternal love. She freely admits that she loves some children more than others (poor Henri), and loves nobody as much as she loves herself. It would be easy to portray her as a stone-hearted monster, but Desplechin and co-screenwriter Emmanuel Bourdieu opt for a more nuanced strategy. Junon knows her limitations and is unashamed of them. She refuses to be the all-sacrificing mother so cherished by classical Hollywood. She´s still pretty awful though, but that´s just my take. The film adopts a strictly non-judgmental stance.
The Vuillards gather for Christmas but the uncomfortable reunion is redefined by the revelation that Junon is dying of cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant for even a slim chance at survival. This sounds like soap opera material, but Desplechin´s dysfunctional fairy tale is told from a detached point of view that is more surgical than melodramatic. Not that sparks don´t fly from time to time. A drunken Henri delivers the most awkward toast since "The Celebration" (1998) and Abel´s opening sermon about Joseph ("His loss is my foundation") is deeply heartfelt.
Coming from a small and relatively friction-free family, the world of the Vuillards is alien to me which may explain why I was indifferent to the film when I saw it last year. On a second viewing, I was better able to appreciate the vastness of Desplechin´s domestic epic. His eye for detail is so fine that the characters´ interpersonal relationships are established almost immediately then rendered more ambiguous with each progressive development. Psychology is one of the film´s primary concerns, but we still can´t answer why, for example, Elizabeth´s contempt for Henri is so unrelenting. These characters are no push-button mechanical constructs with easily articulated motivations.
There are so many characters roaming around the Vuillard house, it´s difficult to keep track of them as a viewer yet each of them is unique. Ivan´s wife Sylvia is serenely narcissistic, not unlike Junon which provides a double meaning: Ivan has married a girl just like mom and she happens to be played by Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve´s daughter. Elizabeth´s son Paul (Emile Berling) is undergoing treatment for a dissociative disorder (the horror of modern psychiatric medicine tinge many scenes) that suggests the Vuillard family´s problem may stem from nature as much as nurture since both of his uncles suffered similar mental health problems. There are many other characters that you´ll need to discover on your own.
Desplechin´s grab-bag style includes everything from camera irises to direct address and even to the use of puppets, imbuing the film with a sensibility that is paradoxically both old-fashioned and very modern. The tone of the narrative shifts frequently too, mixing in whimsy along with the melancholy.
