Un Conte de Noël
***/****
starring Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Cosigny
screenplay by Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieu
directed by Arnaud Desplechin
by Bill Chambers A Gallic collision of The Family Stone (ugh) and The Royal Tenenbaums (woo) but far more palatable and novelistic than that might suggest, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) unfurls over Christmas in bourgeois Roubaix, where the dysfunctional Vuillards have congregated to weigh their options now that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with cancer. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and the only potential matches are black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and Henri's suicidal nephew Paul (Emile Berling), whose mother, Henri's sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, in a performance too smirkily opaque for its own good), had previously banished Henri from their lives due to the boundless contempt she's nursed for him since childhood. Backstories for the other members of the clan--curiously sharing their last name with the protagonists of Desplechin's previous film, the similarly dense Kings and Queen, thus facilitating the obvious comparisons to Salinger's Glass Family--and various satellite characters are gradually weaved into this narrative throughline (it's perhaps more accurate to say they're sewn into it like patches on a crazy quilt), eventually revealing a prismatic view of the season in which any yuletide survivor should be able to find her sweet spot. The pall of mortality hanging over the festivities created a frisson of recognition for me, as did an almost antidotal moment where an airing of The Ten Commandments briefly narcotizes everyone in the room, though that's neither here nor there. Indeed, the movie is more broadly appealing and consistently engaging than all that: Desplechin's familiar but no less maddeningly discordant mix of storytelling devices and cinematic techniques is finally anchored by the demands of the homecoming genre and the sentiments of the holiday itself. (Those sentiments, however, may apply more to Festivus than to Christmas, with the disease known as Graft-Versus-Host serving as a mordant metaphor for the inevitable yet inorganic reversal of the parent/child dynamic.) In that sense, it's not quite the galvanizing high-wire act that was Kings and Queen, but it is a gift that keeps on giving. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
