Mi Top Ten: Puesto 4°

El primer día del resto de nuestras vidas/A Christmas' Tale/Un conte de Noël (Arnaud Desplechin)

"En el universo desaforado de Desplechin entran decenas de referencias cinematográficas, literarias y musicales, acaso excesivas aunque siempre discordantes e inesperadas. Pero más se le agradece su falta de condescendencia y de manipulación emocional. Si bien a algunos el filme puede resultarle algo frío e impenetrable, es precisamente la forma en la que los personajes son retratados la que permite que nos resulten, a la vez, contradictorios y humanos, tan incomprensibles como, finalmente, parecidos a todos nosotros. Es que sus diferencias no hacen más que evidenciar sus similitudes con los demás: son padres e hijos, hermanas y hermanos, todos buscando algo de amor aunque sea de las maneras más curiosas." D.L.

"Un conte de Noel", de Arnaud Desplechin (crítica)

Link (Clarín)

Review: "Un conte de Noël", de Arnaud Desplechin (Village Voice)

J. Hoberman

Arnaud Desplechin is a cinema maximalist: A Christmas Tale feels like all 12 days of seasonal merriment, and then some. This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama, shown last month in the New York Film Festival, is a heady plum pudding of a movie—studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible.

It should be heavy, but it's not. Des-plechin is a feverish spinner of tales. Like his previous movie, the equally extravagant ensemble piece Kings and Queen (2005), A Christmas Tale weaves the ties—genetic and otherwise—that bind a particular family into a mad tapestry. The narrative pattern seems to extend every which way at once as Desplechin brings the Vuillard clan back to their parental home in Roubaix, a small city on the Belgian border (and, not coincidentally, the place where Desplechin grew up as well).

The gathering is not only prompted by the season but by the discovery that the family's chic and imperious matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. This illness reunites the Vuillards and also defines them. The family's first-born son, Joseph, died of the same cancer at the age of six. His sister, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), remains traumatized, as does her younger brother Henri (Desplechin regular Mathieu Amalric, in another madcap performance), who was conceived in the hopes that he'd prove to be a compatible bone-marrow donor for his doomed sibling. He wasn't, and Junon has never forgiven him, bestowing such affection as she has on her last child, the once-mentally-unstable Ivan (Melvil Poupaud). To further complicate this modern fairy tale, Elizabeth—a depressed but successful playwright—has managed to "banish" feckless Henri for his involvement in some sort of family swindle.

Desplechin manages to establish most of this in a matter of minutes—as well as introduce the family's infinitely tolerant patriarch, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), a lovably hoarse-voiced, pop-eyed troll who owns a small factory, listens to avant-garde jazz, dotes on his wife, and seemingly performs all the household chores singlehandedly. Appetite whetted and table set, the viewer waits to see what will happen when the three siblings, together with spouses, children, and the odd cousin find themselves together—not least in that the two compatible donors, Elizabeth's emotionally fragile teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling), and the roistering black sheep Henri, turn out to be the family's least compatible members. To further complicate this bizarre competition, it's Paul who has taken it on himself to invite his obnoxious uncle, who arrives with his nonplussed current girlfriend, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos).

As Kings and Queen made clear, Desplechin thrives on drunken escapades, medical procedures, blunt confessions, grand gestures, and screwball riffs. The characters are as volatile as the situation. A Christmas Tale unfolds in a succession of big confrontations and quick vignettes. Henri is introduced staggering through Paris, accompanied by bagpipes and quoting Bataille, until he falls face-down on the pavement. "Still don't love me?" he greets his mother when they find themselves together. ("Never did," she answers, to which he replies, "Same here.") Working the border of cute without ever crossing over, Desplechin is protected by the energy of his film tinkering. There's a sense that he's constantly working out the setup for each scene even while it's happening.

This is a movie of moment-to-moment unpredictability. A long, unexpectedly lyrical montage (city streets, watery surfaces, Christmas lights) heralds Henri's arrival home. The action is prone to sudden bursts of movie-movie music and speeches given directly into the camera. A Christmas Tale has the full New Wave panoply of freeze frames, inter-titles, jump-cuts, and irises—not to mention an abundance of outlandish extra-textuality. The dying Deneuve is nothing less than the spirit of cinema, and the movie's ongoing mother-child thematic is enriched (and deranged) by the presence of her actual daughter Chiara Mastroianni in the role of a disliked daughter-in law. The Vuillard family TV is a constant source of cultural reference, variously transmitting Funny Face, The Ten Commandments, and several excerpts from the all-star A Midsummer Night's Dream that Marx Rein-hardt directed for Warner Bros. in 1935—Desplechin's ambitions not only encompass Shakespeare but theatrical showmanship.

Desplechin has also invented a form of domestic magic realism. Not unlike this movie, the Vuillard home is crammed with stuff—including a doll-house model of itself. Photographs of the dead crowd the mantle. The place is a kind of theater, both lived-in and uncanny, consecrated to the universal, atavistic belief that the dead return to their families at the New Year season. Protesting against his banishment, Henri had written to Elizabeth that "we're in the midst of a myth, and I don't know what myth it is." (On Christmas Eve, Elizabeth maliciously returns the letter unopened as her "present" to Henri.) His confusion is understandable. With its surplus of evocative, clashing, character names—Junon, Abel, Daedalus, Faunia—A Christmas Tale invites myth-and-ritual parsing even as it defeats it.

In any case, the myth is overwhelming. The Vuillards' family history is so thick, it seems like legend—like the wolf supposedly living in their basement. Faunia, who is Jewish, flees back to Paris on Christmas Eve, leaving the Vuillards to celebrate—fireworks, champagne, Mendelssohn skittering in the background—unwrapping family secrets instead of gifts, and watching Charlton Heston's Moses. Just as the Red Sea parts, Henri awakes from a drunken stupor, climbs out his window, and returns to the fold to lead Junon and Paul to midnight mass. Nor is this apparent reconciliation the last Christmas miracle that Desplechin has up his capacious sleeve. Expansive but cozy, convoluted yet circular, at once avant and retro, and contradictory down to its last scene, the movie ends with a new myth—if not a new cosmology—articulated by the writer Elizabeth.

A Christmas Tale opens in New York in the wake of two serious American movies—Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York—each with analogies to Desplechin's. An ensemble drama about a death-haunted family fixated on a particularly obnoxious member and brought together in celebration, Rachel has a close resemblance to A Christmas Tale narrative, while Kaufman works the art-life conundrum with a sense of manic invention rivaling Desplechin's. But where humorless Demme appears handcuffed by self-righteous correctness and morbid Kaufman seems overwhelmed by the chore of directing an undirectable script, Desplechin exhibits a contagious pleasure in his work.

As suffocating (and overpraised) as Rachel and Synecdoche are, one hopes that they haven't sucked the critical oxygen out of the atmosphere or overdrawn all available superlatives from the dictionary. A Christmas Tale is deft, playful, fluid, haunting, and filled with the joy of filmmaking.

Candy and Coal in a Gallic Stocking (The New York Times)

"A Christmas Tale", de Arnaud Desplechin

November 2, 2008

Holiday Movies

By DENNIS LIM

“A CHRISTMAS TALE,” the new feature by the French director Arnaud Desplechin, is haunted by the ghosts of holiday movies past — and not just the ones you’d expect.

From Mr. Desplechin’s breakthrough romantic roundelay, “My Sex Life, or How I Got Into an Argument” (1996), to the overstuffed tragicomedy “Kings and Queen” (2004), his restless, raw-nerved movies are a testament to his wide-ranging cinephilic appetites, and more than most filmmakers, he is quick to own up to his influences.

“A Christmas Tale,” which follows the fractious Vuillard clan through a maelstrom of seasonal cheer and resentment, owes a debt to Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical magnum opus, “Fanny and Alexander,” which opens with one of the most famous Christmas gatherings in movies. “It’s a film I know by heart,” Mr. Desplechin said in an interview last month while in town for the New York Film Festival. Another spiritual forebear, he said, was “The Dead,” John Huston’s quietly majestic version of the James Joyce story, centered on a dinner party to mark the feast of Epiphany. A newer reference point: Wes Anderson’s “Royal Tenenbaums,” a Christmas movie only in name, but, like “A Christmas Tale,” a family drama about the allure and danger of a family myth.

Mr. Desplechin also acknowledged drawing on a somewhat cliché-prone tradition: the Thanksgiving domestic melodrama. “It’s a very humble genre, but it fascinates me,” he said, revealing himself as an unexpected authority on the forgotten likes of “Home for the Holidays,” “The Myth of Fingerprints” and “What’s Cooking?”

“It’s always the same story,” he said. “Everyone will be gathered in the house, and after 1 hour and 10 minutes, someone will say, ‘Actually, I’m gay,’ and the mother will say, ‘By the way, my son, I never loved you.’ ”

With “A Christmas Tale,” which had its premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival and is scheduled to open on Nov. 14, Mr. Desplechin transposes this American recipe for seasonal dysfunction into a quintessentially French context. In practice this means cutting out the boring parts and peeling away the veneer of civility. These holiday-reunion movies, he noted, are premised on simmering grudges and secrets, and they reach their dramatic peak with the clatter of skeletons tumbling out of closets.

“The confession is supposed to be the climax, but it’s always disappointing,” he said. “The son waits to tell everyone he’s gay, but come on, we’ve already figured that out. I thought it would be nice to have a family where everyone is so harsh that all the forbidden things are said at the beginning, and then we can see where it goes from there.”

Accordingly, “A Christmas Tale” abounds with brusque and even baffling declarations. The film opens with the Vuillard patriarch, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), announcing that he “felt no grief” at losing his first-born son, Joseph, who died at 6 of lymphoma. The oldest of the three surviving children, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), now a depressed, angry playwright, has banished her brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric) from the family. Henri, conceived in the vain hope of finding a compatible marrow donor for Joseph, is the black sheep whose very existence is a reminder of his dead brother. When Henri returns for a Christmas visit after a years-long absence, prompted by the cancer diagnosis of the matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), mother and son are soon amiably trading cruel insults. (“Still don’t love me?” “I never did.”)

With “A Christmas Tale,” Mr. Desplechin revisits many of the themes he laid out in his first film, a 54-minute ensemble drama called “La Vie des Morts” (1991) in which an extended family gathers in the wake of a young man’s suicide attempt. That film was aptly titled. Mr. Desplechin’s movies have often dealt with the life of the dead, whether contemplating the forgotten casualties of the cold war in the paranoid espionage thriller “La Sentinelle” (1992) or the wrenching contents of a hate letter bequeathed by a late father to his daughter in “Kings and Queen.” In “A Christmas Tale,” which takes a particularly literal approach to the Desplechin theme of blood ties, the Vuillards can never escape the specter of mortality. Their children — Elizabeth, Henri and the easygoing Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) — grew up in the shadow of a dead brother and now face the task of saving their mother, who needs a marrow transfusion.

Some of the film’s motifs can also be found in Mr. Desplechin’s personal documentary “L’Aimée” (2007), about the selling of his ancestral home in Roubaix, his hometown in the north of France, where “A Christmas Tale” is also set. The film traces the spectral presence of his grandmother, Thérèse, who died when his father, Robert, was 2, and in ways both playful and profound links this relationship between a son and a mother he barely knew to a famous cinematic meditation on memory and loss, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (also invoked in “A Christmas Tale”).

Mr. Desplechin acknowledged that there are similarities between “L’Aimée” and “A Christmas Tale,” which he worked on at the same time, but he added: “ ‘L’Aimée’ is about melancholy and mourning, and I could say that ‘A Christmas Tale’ is absolutely the reverse. It’s only brutality. That could be a slogan for this film: No melancholy.”

Perhaps so, but almost every other sentiment is accounted for. Mr. Desplechin’s is a cinema of emotional extremes, filled with wild mood swings between love and hate, comedy and savagery. (It’s telling that in describing his own work he has several times brought up jazz and roller coasters.) He prizes density over subtlety, surprise over coherence. While writing he adheres to a principle borrowed from François Truffaut: four ideas per minute. This explains the multiple and sometimes competing layers of meaning in his films, which are routinely described — by critics unaccustomed to this much detail and texture in cinema — as “novelistic.” (His movies are being screened at retrospectives at the IFC Center in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week.) He amplifies the moment-to-moment unpredictability with almost free-associative editing, and by directing his actors to abandon stage directions and reinterpret their lines on the spot.

“Arnaud gets special things from actors, because he makes the set feel so alive,” said Ms. Deneuve, who first worked with Mr. Desplechin on “Kings and Queen.” “We’re encouraged to be as spontaneous as possible. Sometimes the lines are so heavy that you feel you should say them in a very light way, or the other way around.”

Eric Gautier, the cinematographer of “A Christmas Tale” and a regular collaborator of Mr. Desplechin’s since “La Vie des Morts,” also emphasized the importance of alertness. “On Arnaud’s films you never feel you’re in complete control,” said Mr. Gautier, who has become known for the fleet, ultra-responsive style he developed in his movies with Mr. Desplechin, Olivier Assayas and Patrice Chéreau, and is increasingly popular with American auteurs (he shot Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” and has just finished Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock”). “On this film, every time we went back into a room we would light it differently,” Mr. Gautier continued. “It’s always an experiment. You cannot imagine what’s next; you’re always searching.”

Artists who believe in the mystique of originality are often reluctant to reveal their inspirations. But the magpielike Mr. Desplechin revels in what the writer Jonathan Lethem has called the ecstasy of influence. “I didn’t invent anything,” he said. “Being a director is not such a grand thing. My job is just to show the audience what I love.”

To judge from the tangle of associations in “A Christmas Tale,” there is plenty Mr. Desplechin loves. The bit of raga music, nestled in a score that darts from classical to jazz to hip-hop, is a nod to “The River,” Jean Renoir’s lyrical portrait of family life in colonial India. The puppet play that sketches the Vuillards’ back story was inspired by Kara Walker’s cutout silhouettes. There are also more direct quotes sprinkled throughout: a passage from Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals,” a clip of “The Ten Commandments” on television and repeated allusions to Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (the 1935 film version and the Mendelssohn overture).

Given his giddy grab-bag method, it’s fitting that Mr. Desplechin’s production company is named Why Not (it’s also a phrase he uses often in conversation). Listening to him riff on his approach, you realize that expansive gestures lie behind the smallest details. He gave the most troubled character, Elizabeth’s teenage son, Paul, the Joycean last name Dedalus, which was also the name of the roguish hero, played by Mr. Amalric, in “My Sex Life.” “It was a promise to the character,” Mr. Desplechin said. “A way to say: ‘I’ve already filmed your future. You’re having a hard time now, but one day you will have a life.’ ”

Glimpsed in the background, a poster of Terrence Malick’s transcendentalist epic, “The New World,” pays tribute to the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The father Abel’s opening lines are adapted from Emerson’s writings about the death of his firstborn. In a letter to a friend, the poet wrote, “I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve.”

“I’m not sure I understood what he was saying intellectually,” Mr. Desplechin said, “but it sounded poetic. They’re good lines, so I thought the best thing would be to give them to an actor.” Emerson’s inability to mourn became a key to understanding the Vuillards: “It’s a family that contests the idea of sorrow,” he said.

All of this might suggest that Mr. Desplechin’s densely allusive films should come with Cliffs Notes. But he contends that they don’t have to be decoded to be understood. He often talks about trying to watch movies as he did when he was 12 — an ideal viewer, more intuitive and open to enchantment than his adult self. “When you are a kid you don’t have to think,” he said. “You can understand it even if you don’t get it.”

The sensation of being swept along like a wide-eyed adolescent, lost in an empire of signs, comes across vividly in a letter that Mr. Amalric’s Henri writes to Elizabeth in “A Christmas Tale.” “We’re in the midst of a myth,” he says, “and I don’t know what myth it is,” evoking the bewildering and pleasurable flux not just of an Arnaud Desplechin movie but of life itself.