The trite title of this sprawling family portrait may conjure images of mistletoe kisses and cozy family dinners, but viewer beware, A Christmas Tale is no Dickens novel. Director Arnaud Desplechin isn’t interested in Christmas miracles. Instead he uses the trope of a holiday family reunion as a ploy for examining the detachment and festering hatred that infect three generations of a bourgeois French family. The result is a multi-tiered family drama that is in strides both repulsive and mesmerizing.
At the center of the dysfunctional Vuillard family is Junon (Deneuve), the potent matriarch who learns she has a liver disease that will likely develop into leukemia. Her sickness is what reunites the family, as her children and grandchildren are called on as potential bone marrow donors. Among those at the reunion are a previously banished alcoholic son, a young mother who has second thoughts about her choice of husband and a 15-year-old grandson recovering from a mental breakdown, just to name a few. There’s enough emotional trauma here for an army of family therapists, and although the narrative could have easily unspooled into an overwrought melodrama, tragic elements are often handled with remarkable lightness: in one scene, Junon and her husband Abel discuss her treatment options with the casualness of a couple choosing between carpet samples.
That’s not to say this isn’t a heavy movie, but in spite of its bleakness, there’s a strange liveliness to Desplechin’s approach. The ever-inventive cinematography — which includes still shots, intertitles, theatrical lighting and even shadow puppets in its story-telling repertoire — creates a vivacity that shines throughout the movie, even at its darkest moments.
