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Directed by Arnaud Desplechin’s
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A
Christmas Tale Having seen in my lifetime
as a critic something more than three thousand films, it’s somehow
appalling – no, it’s inexplicable – no, ultimately it’s embarrassing
-- that a film as open and straightforward as Arnaud Desplechin’s
“A Christmas Tale” should be so confoundingly
complex that I have almost no idea of what went on during its two and a half
hours. An elderly couple, Junon and Abel (Catherine Deneuve
and her husband Jean-Paul Roussillon), have had three children all these many
years ago. The first-born,
Joseph, had leukemia and died at age 7 – no one in the family had a
compatible marrow that might have saved him, and Junon
still mourns him. They later had
another son, Ivan. Their grown son, Henri (Mathieu Amalric),
an alcoholic, embezzled some money five years ago, and his sister Claude
bails him out on the understanding that he will have absolutely no further
contact with her or with his family.
In the meantime, Junon is discovered to have
a pre-cursor to the same Leukemia that killed her son Joseph. Again, only a marrow transplant might
save her, though it might also kill her. Junon and Abel invite all the family to celebrate
Christmas at the family home in Roubaix, and this is where I lost track of
– I can’t say the plot, because there is barely enough plot to
sustain the film. What I lost
sight of was whom – who was mad at whom and why, for instance why did Chiara Mastroianni (yes, the
daughter of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni), playing a daughter-in-law of the family,
get the inside jokeit? keep
a torch burning (a symbolic torch, but a torch neverheless)
for one of the brothers, who appears to be even more of a loser than Henri? And what about Paul, the teenaged son of one of the family, who may or may not
have schizophrenia? But he does
have the compatible bone marrow, as does the scapegrace Henri. And what does it mean that Henri
brings his latest girlfriend to the Christmas celebration except that
she’s Jewish and won’t stay; she has family waiting for her in
Paris. And what about Desplechin’s use of music of all genres and ages
and styles, to say nothing of his use of the iris, to isolate one or another
of his characters? And perhaps
even more important, three critics I admire – Roger Ebert, Stephanie Zacharek and A.O. Scott – each wrote rave reviews
of the film without even once mentioning what happens in it. That should make me feel better about
not getting it, but somehow it doesn’t. All I can take away from that is that
they were as confounded as I was.
I think one problem with the film is that at least for us in the
English-speaking world, not quite enough character separation is exposed in
the script, and so what we hear or learn about one person might as well have
come from another; for me the brothers and sisters were too
interchangeable. And yet,
“A Christmas Tale” has beauty, violence and even poetry; it
awaits someone smarter than me to unravel it. The film is available on DVD at stores
or through Netflix. |