Powerful

A Major Disappointment

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

...Not that it needed to, but if your movie is 2 hours 32 minutes long, then, well, I suppose something really interesting ought to develop. "A Christmas Tale" has an intriguing if well trodden premise - a family coming together for Christmas, to find the cancer-stricken mum a suitable bone marrow donor - but in spite of scenes which promise much, the whole movie doesn't really take off. People will argue that life is precisely that, very nonresolving and a series of tableaux, but the short cuts and staccato editing make this tale harder to enjoy than most. Not to mention so many issues which are left hanging in midair, other than the director nudging us "C'est la vie". You'd be hard pressed to understand why little gets developed to reach something of a climax.So the sister, at the end of the film, probably goes on hating his second brother without really understanding herself; the youngest brother allows his wife to sleep with his cousin, who had been carrying a torch for her over the years. That said, the acting all round is excellent, a well rehearsed cast including the ageless Catherine Deneuve, characters who are fleshed out decently, but who'd really remember a series of interminable scenes which doesn't exactly coalesce into an artistic whole? As an intimate family drama it's certainly too long at 152 minutes.

I've sat through a couple of Desplechin-Bourdieu films (Esther Kahn, Comment je me suis dispute) that I've hated. Long, talky and pointless, I thought. But Un Conte is different; it carefully brings a family to life in all its complexity. The father is patient with those around him when he could easily be bitter and harsh: it is a superb performance by Jean Paul Roussillon. Catherine Deneuve as the mother glides through her part but we can't be critical because she gives the movie so much star power (just as Cary Grant did for four Hitchcock pictures).The children are very well acted. Henri will be a screw-up for the rest of his life but will win people's affection, certainly he did mine. Ivan's easy fatherhood skills and laissez-faire approach to his wife's infidelity are memorable. Elizabeth's attitude towards Henri is the most problematic thing in the film. We have to take it on faith that his behaviour has been so awful that she is justified in taking the action she does. Anne Consigny gives a moving performance as the sister with a grievance.

An overly long and incredibly too talky dysfunctional family drama about a clan reuniting for one Christmas to see which if any family members will have bone marrow that's compatible with that of the matriarch, played by a chilly Catherine Deneuve. She's dying of a rare kind of cancer, and the spectre of that eventuality plus the proximity of brothers and sisters who haven't seen each other for a while and have scores to settle puts everyone in a reflective mood. Unfortunately for us, they stay in that mood for nearly three hours, and they talk and talk and talk endlessly about it.There's far too much plot, some of it quite banal, some of it very interesting. The film is well executed and acted, but it's also distant and cold. I never felt vested in anything that happened to these people, and I greeted the ending with the curiosity of one who has spent a lot of time with something and simply wants to finish it rather than with any real concern for what the ending would be."A Christmas Tale" falls into the trap of too many family dysfunction dramas: We all have our own families to deal with in real life, so if we're going to spend 2-3 hours listening to the petty whining of someone else's, it better damn well be worth our time.Grade: B

When the Vuillard family comes back from church, on Christmas eve's day, they suddenly realize that Simon the painter is missing. Father Vuillard suggests that his children go to search him, because he has an inclination to drink and gets easily into fights. Since Ivan's wife does not want to go, his former lover Elizabeth goes. Driven by a woman's infallible instinct, she finds Simon immediately in one of those rare bars that are open at that time in Paris, the owner and the guests being mainly Muslims for whom there is no reason to close up during the Christian holidays. And now there comes one of the most wonderful scenes between man and woman in the history of movies: He has already "piccolé" as the French say (is pretty intoxicated) when Elizabeth sits to him at the bar. Simon is just going to order another beer with "side-kick" (probably Wodka), and Elisabeth says first: Do you not think you had already enough for today? - He answers: This is none of your business. There she responds: Well, I am feeling in the same mood as you do and therefore drink the same as you drink. So, there are sitting until almost 4 o' clock in the morning in the little bar and are drinking beer and Wodka, having wonderful discussions because soon, they are on the same "level", and, on top of all, they are even going to get reconciled letting passing revue what went wrong in their common past, and we hear out of Simon's, and soon also out of Elisabeth's mouth some of the most astonishing confessions that they would probably never have been able to utter in any other environment (there is a joke in French between "s'enivrer" = getting drunk and "environment").In Douglas Sirk's "Written on the wind", there is a similar scene between Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall. Robert escapes a family ceremony and goes boozing in his favorite restaurant, Lauren follows him. But unlike the scene in Desplechin's movie, the confrontation between the two marks only the definite end in their mutual understanding. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in a book-fragment on Sirk's work, wrote: "Robert starts again to drink. Now, it shows that Lauren Bacall has no solutions for her husband. Instead of going to booze together with him, instead of trying to understand some bits of his grief, she gets more and more pure and causes one more and more to throw up" (translated by the present author from: R.W. Fassbinder, Filme Befreien Den Kopf. Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 16).Another wonderful example of women-power happens between Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos) and Henry (Mathieu Amalric) who plays her lover. Henry, being a drinker, lets himself provoke to analyze the miserable situation of their dysfunctional family in an extremely theatric way attacking directly the husband of one of his sisters who sits besides him. After he is knocked down by this husband and lies on the soil, Faunia seems to be amused by not startled at all about this situation. When he gets on his feet again he throws her his car-keys on the table and says that she has come in the wrong moment to meet his family and that he wants her to "scram". But she sets up one of her absolutely disarming smiles, shoots him with a short but highly intellectual comment and asks him if this would not be nice of him to bring her now a coffee. Henry's face looks like a tank was driven over it.Arnaud Desplechin's movies are as far away from everything that is produced by or imitated from Hollywood as they can be. They are symphonies of style where the rhythm seems to tell the different interwoven stories rather than they are connected by an inner succession. This film consists practically exclusively of a super-all-star cast of the most famous still living French actors. A true highlight.