A Christmas Tale - Arnaud Desplechin

The title of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale evokes a sentimental, fairytale-like feeling. It suggests a story in which all problems are brought to heel by spirit of the holiday, sweeping away conflict and renewing old bonds. Desplechin’s film does not play out this way, but is instead a deep and complex family drama (occasionally a comedy) that offers little in the way of resolution. This is the kind of film where nothing “happens” because it is much more interested in examining its characters and the subtleties of their relationships with each other.

A Christmas Tale is about a family haunted by loss. The parents, Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), have four children: Joseph, who died of leukemia at the age of two, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), Henri (Mathieu Amalric), conceived in the hope that he might be a compatible bone marrow donor for Joseph, and Ivan (Melvil Poupaud). The death of Joseph has affected the family in profound ways that they may or may not quite grasp; he is at various times described as having disappeared from the family memory and defining it. Henri, created for the purpose of giving renewed life to his brother, has, in the wake of this failure, spent his life taking from everyone and his selfishness prompts Elizabeth to banish him from her life and from the family. She believes he is evil, a poison – perhaps she blames him for not being able to save Joseph, whose death has left a deep void in her life. No one in the family can quite understand what happened to make Elizabeth want nothing more to do with Henri, but they seem to have accepted it with little argument.

For five years Henri is excluded from family gatherings, though he sees his parents and Ivan and his cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto), who is like a brother, on occasion. When Junon learns that she has liver cancer and will need a bone marrow transplant, Henri is brought back into the fold, having proved to be a match. Elizabeth’s teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling), is also a match but there is reluctance on everyone’s part to have him donate. Aside from his age, there is also the fact that he’s recently been hospitalized for mental problems. Elizabeth worries about what the stress of the situation will do to Paul but, at the same time, part of her wants him to be the donor so that he can feel that he’s done something good to balance the bad things his illness has driven him to do. Junon, however, reasons that it’s only right for Henri to be the donor: he came from her womb so she’s taking back what’s hers.

Junon is strangely resigned to her fate, at one point deciding that she won’t have the transplant at all because of the possible side effects. The transplant could, in fact, kill her. Abel spends a great deal of time calculating probabilities, trying to determine the best course of action. Elizabeth’s husband, Claude (Hippolyte Giradot), joins him in this in a scene which basically reduces Junon to a mathematical equation. What they determine is that it’s basically a question of months or years with the same result: Junon will die. She accepts this gracefully.

During the course of the film, many things bubble to the surface. There is Henri’s late wife, to whom he was married for such a short time that he never had the chance to introduce her to anyone in the family, but whose photo is nevertheless included on the mantle. There is Abel’s mother’s sexuality and the widowed partner who is still invited to family gatherings. There’s Sylvia’s complex history with Ivan, Simon and Henri, all of whom wanted her. When she learns that the three men decided her fate between themselves, she’s thrown for a loop and it changes the dynamics of certain relationships, though not necessarily in a bad way. And of course there’s the mysterious rift between Elizabeth and Henri, which the film constantly circles back to, and the spectre of Joseph’s death which hangs over everything. Desplechin is so deeply invested in the psychological state of this family that resolution becomes irrelevant; it’s about how they interact now, not where they go from here.

The film does not fit easily into any genre, as Desplechin plays around a lot with style, demonstrating how differently we might view the characters if he decided to turn the plot this way or that. The tone of the film is similarly unstable as, like most families, this one is not defined by either comedy or drama, but moves through grades of both. In other hands this might give the film an unbearable volatility, but Desplechin uses it to his advantage as he explores the various dynamics at play. The lack of narrative consistency does not rob us as an audience, but rather enhances our understanding of these characters.

The actors are, across the board, excellent and play off each other with an ease which suggests a decades long history together. The stand outs are Deneuve, Consigny and Amalric, who perhaps have the advantage of playing the characters who loom the largest, but everyone is given a chance to show his/her skill, and none of the actors delivers even a moment that is off the mark. The performances of all the actors resonate and the film itself leaves a lasting impression.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: