If you think your extended family can hurt each other, watch the Vuillard family cut each other to the bone during heated exchanges in “A Christmas Tale.”
Steeped in rich subplots and cartons of cigarettes, the subtitled flick is a French version of “The Family Stone” if you replaced all the Hollywood melodrama and hokiness for imaginative visual techniques and realistic dialogue that captures a natural light humor while dealing with dark themes such as a prodigal son’s threats and a withering relationship between son and mother.
Many threads steal a scene here or there, but the driving force behind the Vuillard family sleeping under the same roof for the first time in five years is Catherine Deneuve as Junon, the Vuillard matriarch who learns she can die of liver cancer or potentially “burst into flames” from treatment.
Unfurling which of her three children and three grandchildren is compatible with her blood type to donate bone marrow would be where most screenwriters would rest, but co-writers Emmanuel Bourdieu and Arnaud Desplechin, who also directs, continued weaving intriguing relationships into the script.
Establishing the bad blood in the family and complications such as one grandson “going bonkers” in the first few methodical sequences may turn off American audiences who don’t enjoy character-driven dramas, especially movies that clock in at 2 1/2 hours.
But Desplechin’s narrative, told with a creative flair, is so well done it’s worth riding out.
In Desplechin’s hands, characters can even turn to the camera to talk to the audience, and the typically amateur technique doesn’t reek of a failed series pilot or B-movie destined for straight-to-DVD release.
You’ll smile when Jean-Paul Roussillon’s Abel, Junon’s older husband, asks his grandsons whether they’ve seen Anatole, the wolf who lives in his basement, and then watch with longing when a daughter-in-law discovers her fate was determined by her husband and in-laws without her knowledge. [email protected]
