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Christmas Tale, A
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| Year: |
2008
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Director: |
Arnaud Desplechin
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| Stars: |
Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melville Poupaud, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni, Laurent Capulleto, Emile Berling, Thomas Obled, Clément Obled, Françoise Bertin, Samir Guesmi
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| Genre: |
Drama |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Junon Villiard (Catherine Deneuve) is a sick woman: she has cancer and badly needs a bone marrow transplant, but also needs a donor when she has a rare blood type. This means only someone in her family can provide that, but there is a past for all of them that makes this even more traumatic than it would be ordinarily because Junon and her husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) had a son years ago who died of the very same illness. In fact, though they already had a child, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), she wasn't compatible as a donor and they took the decision to have another baby, Henri (Mathieu Amalric) to offer a solution...
The fact that this did now work out would appear to be the source of all the misery for this family in A Christmas Tale, or Un conte de Noël if you were French, a film by Arnaud Desplechin who was by this stage in his career well known for his sprawling sagas which stretched out their plots as far as they could go, yet didn't quite resolve them all neat and tidy and wrapped up with a bow. This was no exception, and there were signs his style was wearing thin with audiences as it received as many, if not more, grumblings from the naysayers as any of his previous efforts had with many watching it all the way through for a good two-and-a-half hours then leaving it none the wiser.
It's true Desplechin tended to avalanche the audience with conversation and even monologue, using techniques such as photographs or actors addressing the camera directly to render the relationships denser to a near-opaque degree, though most of that was down to the seemingly endless soul-searching this extended family endured, and for some it really was an endurance. In its favour the acting was excellent throughout, helping to sell some points which remained difficult to divine by the end, never mind during the scenes where they were supposed to be cleared up, mainly because it felt like a puzzle box of emotional damage was being unfolded here, with every one of them labouring under some grudge or other, not to mention a hefty amount of regret.
This weighs heavily on them as they gather for Christmas, leading to the sort of get-together implemented by such plays as Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings and umpteen holiday special episodes of your favourite sitcom; your least favourite, too. This tale was a lot more bitter, and although it was billed as a comedy drama, the comedy was a lot harder to fathom with only one real laugh in the whole thing (the amateur dramatics) and more often than not the rest of it taken up with trying to work out why he doesn't like her or why she doesn't like him and so forth. The main thread running through this was the presence of a ghost: the deceased child from all those years ago, which the glacially controlling Junon doesn't seem to have forgiven Henri for not saving.
As if this was a tiny acorn of disgruntlement from which a mighty oak tree of disdain grew, when we catch up with the Villiards in the present day he is now the black sheep of the family, with Elizabeth telling him in no uncertain terms some years ago that she never wanted to talk to him again. They have another brother too, Ivan (Melville Poupaud) who is lumbered with a wife, Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), having reservations about ever marrying him, and as if that were not bad enough Elizabeth's son Paul (Emile Berling) is suffering with mental illness. You can see this was laid on pretty thick, and that's without going into further detail as the anger blossoms throughout the rest of the story, with them only getting together because of Junon's malady, and not even sure they want to save her in some cases. If you were looking for Christmas cheer, this wasn't the place to go, and while you could appreciate the sparks and otherwise the cast were able to create, overall it was crafted with care yet too jammed with umbrage to entertain. All that for an ambiguous ending, too. Music by Grégoire Hetzel.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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