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In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes
against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of
actors, and his interest tends to fan out over many characters, whose mixed strengths and flaws jolt the viewer out of easy
identification with any of them, compelling instead a more complex, deferred, time-capsule-release sympathy. This
environmental, novelistically long approach, with its digressive and converging plotlines, is admirably suited to the family
romance, a specialty of Desplechin’s, with A Christmas Tale his greatest example.

His fascination with the bonds of family distinguishes Desplechin and many French filmmakers of his generation from their
New Wave predecessors. That famous movement’s auteurs disdained Freudian psychology (at least at first) and rarely
embedded their protagonists in familial contexts; think of Godard, whose characters spring to life in an existential present,
with no hint of having had parents, much less grandparents. The important generation of French directors that followed,
including Philippe Garrel, Maurice Pialat, Jacques Doillon, Catherine Breillat, Olivier Assayas, and Desplechin (born in
1960, the same year the New Wave crested internationally), may be heavily identified with the formal freedom and
nonstudio look of that earlier era, but they’ve also been much more inclined to pursue parent-child connections, perhaps
because they are offspring, so to speak, of the groundbreaking New Wave. For example, Garrel casts his own father and son
in his movies; in his lovely Summer Hours, Assayas traces the fortunes of a family at the point of dispersal; and Desplechin
focuses relentlessly on family dynamics, from his first film, La vie des morts, up through The Sentinel, My Sex Life . . . or
How I Got into an Argument (where the collegial circle becomes a second, substitute family), Esther Kahn, Kings and
Queen, and now A Christmas Tale.

Recently, the impulse to tackle intergenerational narratives may say something about the state of French politics or a
conserving impulse (even on the part of left-wing filmmakers) toward traditional culture at a moment when globalization is
eroding any sense of national identity. For Desplechin especially, the family is an inevitable starting point. It may be deeply
messed up—“dysfunctional,” if you prefer—riven by jealousies, enmities, and unsettled scores. There may never be quite
enough love to go around. The family may be the original source of the individual’s neurotic split. Yet for all its drawbacks,
the center somehow holds: the family unit is inescapable.

In A Christmas Tale, the members of the cultivated Vuillard family—all play instruments, spout aphorisms—seem to have
divvied up among themselves all possible responses to life’s trials. The first trial, from which all subsequent traumas
followed, was the death of the firstborn, Joseph, in childhood. The paterfamilias, Abel (ably played by veteran actor Jean-
Paul Roussillon), is a kindly stoic who counsels forgiveness and tolerance, and is more often than not shot down for it. His

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wife, Junon (Catherine Deneuve, in a performance beyond praise), is a cool-hearted realist who knows the limits of her
capacity to love and the power of her survival instinct. Their dour, unhappy daughter, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), has taken
the path of self-righteous anger, condemning her scapegoated scapegrace younger brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric), who in
turn stirs the pot with buffoonish stunts that do little to allay the others’ mistrust of him. Then there is the youngest
brother, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), who tries to be peacemaker; his wife, Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni); cousin Simon (Laurent
Capelluto); Elizabeth’s disturbed son, Paul (Emile Berling); and several relatives and hangers-on, including Henri’s
girlfriend, Faunia (the wonderful Emmanuelle Devos). All are brought together at Christmastime to engage an immediate
crisis: Junon is suffering from a rare form of cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant from one of her children or
grandchildren.

We can, if we wish, see Desplechin’s film as a tougher version of that recent Hollywood Christmas crowd-pleaser The
Family Stone, which also features a large clan converging on a mother stricken with cancer. In fact, A Christmas Tale
follows in the footsteps of the holiday family-reunion film that The Family Stone represents, even as it deviates
substantially from that tradition, with its rockier roads to reconciliation and its bumpier camera moves. There are also
echoes here of Ingmar Bergman’s Christmas preparations in Fanny and Alexander (with Faunia’s skeptical Jewish outsider
reprising Erland Josephson’s Isak role)—not to mention the many Bergman films where a quite breathtaking animosity
breaks out within couples or between parent and child.

What sets A Christmas Tale apart from any holiday film in memory, however, is its technique. Desplechin has always been
an immensely skillful and vigorous visual stylist who stops just short of making a fetish of the pictorial. Here he employs a
catchall of self-conscious devices that draw our attention to the film’s fabrication: chapter headings, actors directly
addressing the camera, iris shots, split screens, shadow puppets representing the characters, multiple first-person voice-
overs, and a third-person omniscient narrator. Oddly enough, none of these devices have the Brechtian alienation effect of
taking us out of the action in order to induce critical reflection; rather, they are shortcuts that propel us further into the
naturalistic narrative. They are all warming, amusing modes of storytelling, and very New Wave (think of Truffaut’s high-
speed openings in Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim). Their ultimate effect is to keep us off balance. The same
could be said for the director’s approach here to individual shots, a stutter-step technique that includes short pans and
tracks, multiple takes of actions that last only a few seconds, and a good deal of cutting. The aesthetic of deep-focus, long-
duration takes that Desplechin developed in earlier films has been jettisoned, replaced by the visual equivalent of turntable
scratching (as we see Ivan do as DJ of the town dance). And if the visuals keep us jarred, the soundtrack’s astounding
variety, from Vivaldi to raga to Cecil Taylor, induces another sort of disorientation.

It is fair to ask: why this set of techniques for this particular film? For one thing, the shot instability reinforces our doubt
that any of the protagonists can be trusted entirely. Rationalization distorts each of their perspectives, and the image on-
screen often suggests the camera has a subjective angle too. For instance, when Elizabeth narrates her flashback about why
she hates Henri, taking us to a courtroom scene, Amalric’s Henri is shown skulking in a weaselly, malevolent manner. But
did he actually act this way or is it merely Elizabeth’s prejudiced memory? Desplechin leaves that for us to decide. Another
instance: We see Paul looking into a mirror; a black dog stands in the background. We later learn from his own spoken
testimony that he was having a hallucination. All we can do is store what we first see in our memory, not certain what it
means; but the unsteady way Desplechin shoots the scene has already made us suspect its reliability.

The director also keeps us off kilter, I think, to dilute the melodramatic overtones of the story—the cancer of the mother, the
death of her first child, the despair of Elizabeth, the emotional breakdown of Paul, the soul-destroying pining of Simon for
Sylvia, his cousin’s wife. Desplechin undercuts the plot material’s potential “heaviness” not just with a virtuoso array of self-
conscious cinematic techniques but also with a taste for comedy. Elizabeth’s husband, Claude (Hippolyte Girardot),
pummels Henri at the kitchen table in a scene whose violence might have shocked us; instead, it comes across as ridiculous
farce, partly through intercut reaction shots of Faunia laughing with embarrassment and partly through the victim’s
seeming indifference to the blows—plus, a giddy Irish jig plays in the background. As he showed in Kings and Queen,
Desplechin tends to turn obstinately playful in the presence of the grim story lines he has set in motion, such as serious
mental illness, familial antipathy, and the looming death of a parent. For this reason, the director’s most oft-used male
actor, Mathieu Amalric, with his clown’s self-mocking, sardonic grimace, is the perfect interpreter of Desplechin’s refusal to
be crushed by mourning or to surrender to sentimentality.

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Lightness and joy frequently overcome the film’s darker notes. You could not ask for a more eloquent testimony of affection
between man and woman than when Faunia hugs Henri from behind, saying merely, “My friend.” Even the expressions of
hostility have a cauterizing, engaging honesty. One of my favorite scenes is between Deneuve and Amalric on the outdoor
swing in the snow. “Still don’t love me?” he asks. “I never did,” she says. “Same here,” he retorts. “I wasn’t a very good
mother?” she asks with detached curiosity. The two seem to understand each other so well, and can look so calmly at their
lifelong mutual dislike, that you wonder if their antipathy is in earnest or a form of role-playing both have settled into with
gusto.

Another example of grace erupting in the midst of recriminations comes when Chiara Mastroianni’s irresistible Sylvia gives
herself to her long-suffering adorer, Simon. Without attempting to read too much religious symbolism into this Christmas
tale, I can say only that her adulterous disrobing is made to look like an angel’s appearance in an Annunciation. (The
lighting in this scene, as at other key moments, is both expressionistic and epiphanic.) When the time comes for Sylvia to
send Simon on his way, returning to her children and her husband, she says: “I invented Ivan by living with him. I’ll invent
you by not.”

Desplechin and his cowriter Emmanuel Bourdieu offer us the wittiest French dialogue this side of Sacha Guitry. They dare
push the envelope of syntactical and semantic complexity as far as the ear can absorb, and the film is as literate as it is
visually vibrant. References to Kafka, Emerson, Nietzsche, and the Duc de Saint-Simon abound; poems are quoted and long
prose passages read aloud. These literary texts are just one of many cultural layers in the movie, from the tapestry of jazz
and classical music on the soundtrack to the glimpses of such movies as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Funny Face, The
Ten Commandments . . . If we look for special meanings in this chain of references, they all seem to point to the possibility
of the miraculous, the fantastic, or the spiritually elevated breaking through the glum logjam of everyday malaise. Beyond
that, the Vuillards surround themselves with cultural artifacts that might teach them how to live, but their ability to cope
finally comes down to a roll of the dice. Will Junon’s body accept or reject the bone marrow transplant?

That still leaves the crisis of Elizabeth’s melancholia. “Why am I always so sad?” this successful playwright asks her father.
He offers a number of answers, including that she expects people to be perfect and that she has taken on the grieving
function for her whole family, which still mourns the loss of Joseph. Another reason might be that she has no sense of
humor, making her an anomaly among the director’s personae. But it is something like a chicken-or-egg conundrum: which
came first, her sadness, her humorlessness, or her self-righteousness? Somehow, by the end, even Elizabeth gets her
bearings.

Desplechin generally makes exceptionally long films—perhaps because the extra time allows him to explore a set of crises in
depth and then move beyond them to some greater wisdom or acceptance. As in his previous film, the similarly lengthy
Kings and Queen, Amalric’s bizarre, borderline bipolar character is merely the most extreme, scapegoat member of a set of
unhappy, broken people who must find their way to repair, first by avoiding their relations, then by returning to the scene of
the crime—the family nest—and colliding like bumper cars with each other until the shaking up produces the desired
healing. Yes, people go crazy, Desplechin suggests, or become melancholy because life suddenly seems unbearable, but then
they get over it and come out the other end. That there is another end ranks him finally with the optimists.

Phillip Lopate’s most recent books are Two Marriages (fiction), Notes on Sontag (nonfiction), and At the End of the Day
(selected poems).

Film Essays

Posted on December 01, 2009

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