Susan Granger’s review of “A Christmas Tale” (IFC Films)
Gallic filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin’s latest offering joins other dysfunctional-family, holiday-reunion films and it’s no better, no worse than its bourgeois predecessors. Junon (Catherine Deneuve) is the venerable matriarch of the cheerless Vuillard clan in Roubaix in Northern France. Recently diagnosed with early-stage leukemia, she’s looking for a bone marrow donor for an experimental treatment. With her long-suffering husband, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), at her side, her illness evokes memories of the death of her sickly eldest son, Joseph, more than 40 years ago, a grim tragedy that still haunts his younger siblings. There’s Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a successful playwright currently undergoing treatment for chronic depression; Henri (Mathiew Amalric, villainous in “Quantum of Solace”), an irresponsible, alcoholic womanizer who has been banished by his sister in exchange for settling his monetary debts; and self-indulgent Ivan (Melvil Poupaud). Running an annoyingly interminable two-and-half hours, the multiple, often intricate extended family relationships, grudging emotional baggage and indiscriminate bed-hopping are indulgently Chekhovian %u2013 spiked with acerbic dialogue by Desplechin and Emmanuel Bordieu. Mendelssohn’s overture to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” is used repeatedly in the background, along with the 1935 Hollywood version of the play on TV screen in the parlor of the Vuillard home. I suspect an appreciation of this comic drama hinges on one’s French cinema background: Amairic and Consigny co-starred in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” while the names of several characters are the same as in Desplechin’s “Kings and Queen” (2004), and there’s irony in chilly Junon’s cryptic criticism of her daughter-in-law, played by Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter by Marcello. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “A Christmas Tale” is a self-consciously cranky, squabbling 6. Perhaps their perpetual feuding will make you feel better about your own family.
