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A CHRISTMAS TALE
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As A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel) opens, matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve, 8 Women) is diagnosed with myelodysplasia (a bone-marrow disease leading to leukemia), which news she absorbs with queenly serenity. Her adoring likeable toad-faced husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), spurred into action, has all the extended family tested for transplant compatibility. Then he invites, to the family manse in dreary rainy Roubaix (near the Belgian border) for a potential final Christmas, their offspring and families:
Sober eldest Elizabeth (Anne Consigny)
Disruptive middle child Henri (Mathieu Amalric, the villain in Quantum of Solace)
Peacemaker youngest Ivan (Melvil Poupard).
There's just one problem: five years earlier, when perpetual problem child Henri was bailed out of his debts by sensible successful playwright Elizabeth, she had only one condition – that she never see Henri again.
We never learn why Elizabeth banished Henri, although throughout the ensuing drama we have plenty of examples of Henri's abysmal behavior. We are introduced to each of these complicated troubled characters, and it's a tribute to director Arnaud Desplechin that we can keep them straight, and comprehend who they are. Yet, in a twisted ensemble piece reminiscent of Woody Allen's morose Manhattan drawing-room dramas like Husbands and Wives or Hannah and Her Sisters, the characters are awash in irresolution and inconsequence. Though things are unsaid that should be said and thing are said that shouldn't be, revelation does not bring change. A wife has a one-night affair with a long-smoldering love, is discovered by her husband, and there is no aftermath, not even a confrontation.
Despite the obvious metaphor that phenotype compatibility fails to correspond to emotional compatibility, Junon eventually gets her transplant, the families go home, and all the old tensions and quarrels resume as if the weekend never happened. Perhaps that's realistic of some families, but it's profoundly uninteresting.
Intimately shot, very well acted (except for Deneuve, who seems incongruously disengaged from her character), and visually engaging, A Christmas Tale is nevertheless a noble waste of two and a half hours. For a better slice of family Christmas-gathering complexity, with developments and story arc and complex resolution in just over half the time, rent John Huston's exquisite The Dead.
Merry Christmas!