At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.
Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale maintains a humorous sangfroid about matters of life and death, then explodes into epiphanies. Catherine Deneuve has never been more magnificent - or should we say magnifique? - as Junon, a matriarch who approaches terminal illness and family upheaval with breathtaking directness. The zesty-if-sad-eyed Jean-Paul Rousillon plays Abel, her sane, salt-of-the-earth husband.
Leading a household tinged with tragedy ever since the early death of their first-born from leukemia (the disease that Junon suffers from now), they hold sway over a brood at odds with themselves or with the world. These parents dominate family life even when it goes against their will: That's one of the movie's many charms.
When was the last time a movie mother admitted she didn't love one of her sons, to his face? You hear it here and you understand why, thanks to the spellbinding frankness of Deneuve and the self-lacerating tragicomedy of Mathieu Amalric as Henri, her third-born. Henri may have a doubly tragic past (his beloved wife died in a car crash), but he's also a jerky black sheep. This amazing screw-up pulls off appalling stunts such as buying a theater to showcase the plays of his strong yet pathos-laden older sister, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny). Then he doesn't pay the bills. He has spent time in the slammer for fraud, but his real punishment is banishment from the family at Elizabeth's orders. He unilaterally defies that banishment on this particular Christmas.
Like the characters in a Preston Sturges movie, but one salted with Gallic identity crises, each man or woman in this movie carries a Punch and Judy theater in the brain. Elizabeth must face other crises besides Henri's reappearance in her life, notably the potential schizophrenia of her son Paull (Emile Berling). Even the family mediator, the youngest child, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), with a knock-out wife, Sylvia (played by Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's real-life daughter), and two fiercely funny young twin boys, sees a tough boulevard ahead. Sylvia and Ivan's cousin Simone (Laurent Capelluto) are suddenly facing up to dangerous, long-simmering feelings.
