Un conte de Noël

Plot synopsis:
Junon Vuillard is Abel Vuillard's wife, and the iron-willed matriarch of the Vuillard family. Junon held her family together through many tough times, and although her willpower helped the family survive and prosper, it also has left many bad feelings among her children. Junon is still a handsome woman, and though her husband (who owns a small fabric dying plant) has become obese and clearly aged, he retains a remarkable clarity, acceptance, tolerance, and unconditional love for his family, and it is clear that he and their love for each other is the lynchpin that holds an otherwise fragmented family together, albeit uneasily.
The couple has three children, all grown and in their 30s. Their eldest daughter is Elizabeth, who is a successful playwright who is married to an equally successful man, Claude. They have one child, 16-year-old Paul, who is mentally ill and taking powerful medication to control his psychiatric problems. The couple's middle son is Henri, who drinks too much and has always fought and argued with other members of the family. He has a new girlfriend, Faunia. Ivan is the couple's youngest son. He is married to Sylvia, and they have two sons, Basile and Baptiste. Henri and Ivan are close friends with Simon, their cousin who was raised with them after the death of his parents. Simon works in Abel's small fabric dying plant, but is an avid and skilled painter in his spare time. He is also an alcoholic who has gotten in trouble many times for brawling in public. All three men dated or were interested in Sylvia at one time, but they manipulated her to think that only Ivan loved her; she married him and grew to love him. The Vuillard family's other son, Joseph, never appears alive in this film but is its core throughout, and the presence around which everyone's psyches revolve: he died of leukemia when he was six years old, despite a desperate effort to save his life by procreating another child who could be a bone marrow donor for him. It may be that part of the siblings' poor relationship is the resentment they feel toward one another for not saving Joseph's life.
Six years prior to the Christmas gathering that is the heart of this film, Henri faced bankruptcy. Elizabeth paid off his debts, but demanded that he never see her again, meaning he was left out of family gatherings as well. Henri kept his promise. The specific reason (if there is one) for this banishment remains unanswered to the very end, but there is much speculation on the part of the family members throughout the film about what precipitated it, including incest.
Just before Christmas, Junon learns that she, too, has leukemia and does not have long to live, though she is offered the potential of a longer lifespan if she gets a bone marrow transplant. Her family gathers at the Vuillard home in Roubaix, a small city in the north of France. The family immediately falls to bickering. Junon asks her children if one of them (or possibly Paul) will donate bone marrow to her that will allow her to survive. Henri and Elizabeth cruelly fight with one another, and Henri begins drinking heavily and hides Paul's medication. Paul fears that the blood test he will have to undergo may also reveal that his father is not his biological parent. Henri initially refuses to have the blood test, because, he claims, he has never loved his mother. Faunia, who is Jewish, has agreed to spend some time with the Vuillards before leaving to spend the holiday with her own family. Her honesty and gentleness have a moderating impact on Henri, and she manages to spend two days with the family before finally leaving.
On 23 December, Rosaimée visits the family for dinner and fireworks. Rosaimée was Abel's mother's friend, although it is suggested that perhaps the two women were lesbian lovers rather than "just friends." Rosaimée tells Sylvia that Simon stopped seeing Sylvia because he believed that she would be happier if she fell in love with Ivan. This deeply upsets Sylvia, who feels betrayed and manipulated by Simon. Henri finally has the blood test without anyone's knowledge, and discovers he can be a donor. He decides to do so despite his coldness toward his mother. Simon disappears on Christmas Eve and begins drinking heavily in local cafes, and the entire family rushes out into the snow to find him. Sylvia discovers him in a distant cafe, and she confesses that she knows Simon loves her. She and Simon spend several hours talking, then return to the Vuillard home and make love. Paul tries to tell Henri about his fears. Henri convinces him that he is not his father, a fact reinforced by the blood test, and reassures Paul that he is not a moral failure for being afraid. The man and boy begin to bond, and Paul begins to improve almost overnight. On Christmas Day, Abel and Elizabeth discuss Elizabeth's longstanding depression, and Abel reads to her from the prologue to Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality about how well we know – or don't know – ourselves. Abel suggests that Elizabeth fears death, and that has led to her caution and depression.
The film ends with Ivan casually discovering that his wife has had sexual intercourse with Simon (they make no real effort to hide it, waking up together in bed the next day and greeting her children from there as they come bearing tea), but the effect on him is not revealed – he seems remarkably blase, almost as though he has expected that this would happen one day. Sylvia seems to love Simon just as he loves her, and it is suggested that the two have agreed to become lovers. Paul decides to stay behind with Henri, who is having a positive effect on his mental health. Henri donates his bone marrow to Junon, but she announces, seemingly before there would be medical evidence of this, that her body will reject the transplant. Elizabeth speculates that Junon will live, but Henri is shown flipping a coin in the hospital in front of his mother and not revealing the answer.

Tags: flashback

Review:
Arnaud Desplechin uses Robert Altman's impressionistic approach to film-making taking multiple characters, plots lines then adding Altman's playfulness with cinematic technique to dazzle the viewer with a rich mix of ideas and allusions.
During an introduction to the cast of characters at the beginning of the film, the death of a young infant early in the family's history suggests that interpersonal problems will result, but it can't be the sole reason for the pathologies represented.
And as the bizarre begin to assemble for a very strange Christmas homecoming the delight we feel for being onlookers instead of participants is palpable in the audience.I should warn that this is not a film in the tradition of "Home Alone" or "A Christmas Story." You may wait a long time for the Baby Jesus to arrive here (as the children on the screen do).
An overly long and incredibly too talky dysfunctional family drama about a clan reuniting for one Christmas to see which if any family members will have bone marrow that's compatible with that of the matriarch, played by a chilly Catherine Deneuve.
I never felt vested in anything that happened to these people, and I greeted the ending with the curiosity of one who has spent a lot of time with something and simply wants to finish it rather than with any real concern for what the ending would be."A Christmas Tale" falls into the trap of too many family dysfunction dramas: We all have our own families to deal with in real life, so if we're going to spend 2-3 hours listening to the petty whining of someone else's, it better damn well be worth our time.Grade: B.
All the actors are wonderful, but I must say that Amalric, who almost always plays this type of character in Despleshin films (Kings and Queen, My Sex Life, etc.) is terrific in this film.
The rest of the cast, Deneuve, Rousillion and Cosigny are all terrific.I love how the script deals with so many subjects, not only of the family history and Junon's need for a donor, but also touches on everything from mathematics to philosophy to literature, to all types of music, religion, and all geared towards how all these things enhance, and does not consume, the life of the family.
I got to hand it to the filmmaker, Arnaud Desplechin, at least on one significant point: A Christmas Tale is like a big book faithfully adapted to the screen, only in this case non-existent, and it has that wonderful if imperfect feeling of surrounding oneself with the world and atmosphere and attitudes of a family where the dysfunction runs deep and clear, emphasizing Tolstoy's classic "no one unhappy family is the same" credo.
His film is also sometimes a big melodrama, folded around a cancer story not unlike a more serious (yet sometimes lighter version of) The Royal Tenenbaums, and centered so firmly around the family during that crazy but loving-despite-everything time of Christmas you'd swear Desplechin watched the first hour of Fanny & Alexander too many times to count.At the same time A Christmas Tale in very much a French film, is attitude and approach to narrative and occasionally nearing that dreaded P-word (pretentious) in being 2 1/2 hours of incidents and confrontations and little details and twists.
A lot happens with the Vuillard family over a few days, but in it uncovers a whole can of worms involving a banished son (Mathieu Amalric, who thankfully is maybe the centerpiece of the ensemble in terms of being the black sheep like Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married), a depressed daughter (Anne Consigny who, despite being effective in a one-note performance, is also so shrill and cold as a character it's hard to feel anything for her, at all, despite her plight of losing her older brother as a child), and a cousin who has loved his cousin's wife ever since he got him, Ivan, the youngest Vuillard brother, to hook up with her so many years ago.
Meanwhile, the mother (Catherine Deneuve, who may not exactly be a great actress but is the greatest living female French star which carries a lot of weight as a true beauty), has cancer, possibly terminal, unless a donor comes forward.So there's a lot here to work with - maybe, perhaps, arguably too much, though it's almost a credit to the director that I can't say exactly what (little things, for example, like the Christmas Eve sex scene are deliberately paced but for good reason), and he laces everything with a curious jazz score throughout, sometimes to great effect and sometimes not.
But, at the least, it's wonderful to see so many good actors in one place, particularly Amalric who is quickly becoming a truly fantastic talent with a lot of range in the work I've seen him in- one day he's a subdued intelligence man in Munich, next he's paralyzed except for one eye-blinking in Diving Bell, and even a 007 villain- and here goes further in a scene stealing performance (one such scene is his toast at the Christmas dinner, a scene actually shocking and hilarious and sad all in a thirty-second split).He and Deneuve and the underrated Jean-Paul Roussillon as the husband of Junon almost make me want to rate the movie higher.
But alas, it is what it is: a very strong take on a familiar subject - crazy and light and dark and tragic and unnerving times with a family at Christmas - and standing it on its head, while also the things I mention above.
And the characters are forced to develop, not necessarily for the better.The humor keeps you interested in this chamber play and the 145 minutes never feel long.
Started thinking about 20 minutes in, "when is it all going to come together with some semblance of cohesion and interest?" To me it never did, and was an overlong borefest throughout, with very short takes leading to other very short takes that never got my interest for any.Never saw any family act the harsh way toward each other that this one did, or talk to each other so carelessly without more mayhem being caused by it than this one did, or showed less love and care for each family member than this one did, even with the mother dying!Why was this kind of labored film supposed to be the right one to show at Christmas?
After his impressing "Kings and queen" in 2004, Arnaud Desplechin proves that he's the best director come out from France in the last two decades with this exhilarating, moving, awfully brilliant "A Christmas tale".
Following the path of its previous feature, the movie mixtures very hard scenes of desperation and hatred feelings with moments of absurd joy in an structure full of elliptical jumps from the past to the present and back again to the memories of another time.
This is a shame because with Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni, and Melvil Poupaud (not to mention others less well known in America) that's a lot of acting talent to waste.
After having enjoyed his "Kings and Queens" and this film left me completely bored and frustrated to the point where I actually left before the movie ended.
The movie also gave us too little character development to understand why the different characters disliked each other so much (this was a story of family dysfunction) so that the dearth of coherent narrative became even more critical.
When the Vuillard family comes back from church, on Christmas eve's day, they suddenly realize that Simon the painter is missing.
And now there comes one of the most wonderful scenes between man and woman in the history of movies: He has already "piccolé" as the French say (is pretty intoxicated) when Elizabeth sits to him at the bar.
So, there are sitting until almost 4 o' clock in the morning in the little bar and are drinking beer and Wodka, having wonderful discussions because soon, they are on the same "level", and, on top of all, they are even going to get reconciled letting passing revue what went wrong in their common past, and we hear out of Simon's, and soon also out of Elisabeth's mouth some of the most astonishing confessions that they would probably never have been able to utter in any other environment (there is a joke in French between "s'enivrer" = getting drunk and "environment").In Douglas Sirk's "Written on the wind", there is a similar scene between Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall.
16).Another wonderful example of women-power happens between Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos) and Henry (Mathieu Amalric) who plays her lover.
Henry, being a drinker, lets himself provoke to analyze the miserable situation of their dysfunctional family in an extremely theatric way attacking directly the husband of one of his sisters who sits besides him.
It is a tale of a highly dysfunctional French upper middle class family with enough head cases to keep any psychologist/analyst rolling in Euros for a life time.
The cast is headed by a radiant Catherine Denuve (as usual)as the head of the household,who has just found out she has a potentially fatal form of bone cancer,and only a bone marrow transplant from a family member may be the only saving grace for her.
The film's rather long running time (two & a half hours)may remind one of certain stage plays by Irish playwright,Brian Freil (but there isn't a slack moment in the entire film---at least I didn't think so).
One of the queerest scenes involved Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), Junon Vuillard's (Catherine Deneuve) husband, and Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), working the statistical chances of survival and the time left if Junon chose to have or not have a bone marrow transplant for her cancer.
This is not something I could ever imagine happening anywhere else.Junon was so cool about the whole thing that you never really thought about the fact that she was dying.The entire family, sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, girlfriends, and others arrive at the family house to celebrate Christmas, each with their own funny and not-so-funny issues.The main issue working throughout the entire film is between brother and sister, Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and Elizabeth (Anne Consigny).
The film deals with family and repentance, and forgiveness, among other issues.Arnaud Desplechin works like no other director I have seen and, while it may be distracting at times, it is never boring.
The two and a half hours fly by.The children's Christmas play was hilarious, and dealt with the same themes.This was definitely one of the best films of 2008..
Two and a half hours of overlong, dragged-out, tedious misery and gloom from start to finish in a dysfunctional neurotic family where nearly everybody hates nearly everybody else and too many try to drown their sorrow in alcohol and tobacco.It is because of pseudo-intellectual artsy-fartsy films like this many say that life is too short for French films.
There are many good French films; this is just not one of them.To add to the misery, the film has been shot in one of the most grey, boring, depressing and uninteresting parts of France, so there is no beautiful scenery to lift it up, and nothing else saves it from total gloom.Not one character is likable, and after thirty minutes, one no longer cares whatever happens to them.This is not a Christmas movie in the traditional sense.
It doesn't get any better.On the other hand, if you appreciate sad films where nothing really happens, except for each family member's psychological trauma interacting with the others', then you may well use this review to conclude that here is something for your taste..
A Christmas Tale has been booked as an extremely unconventional holiday film from most major reviewers.
It feels like the viewer is spying on this family, not in a Hitchcockian sense, but more as a privileged member.
"Worth watching" is difficult to categorize in this place because the film feels like a continuation of this director's style but I know very little about his prior works.
Catherine Deneuve as the mother glides through her part but we can't be critical because she gives the movie so much star power (just as Cary Grant did for four Hitchcock pictures).The children are very well acted.
Today is Christmas Day, so it is the most apposite time to watch this French drama, rife with cancer, marrow transplant, siblings rivalry, unstable mentality, chronic depression, familial incest and distant mother-child relationship, very Christmasy!
A follow-up of KINGS & QUEEN (2004, 6/10), French art house director Arnaud Desplechin concocts a fine potpourri of familial entanglements around the bourgeois Vuillard family, opens with a consequential animated preamble of the loss of their eldest son Joseph at the age of 6 due to a hereditary blood disease while no compatible marrow transplant is found in both parents, the daughter Elizabeth (Consigny) and the second son Henri (Amalric), who is conceived to offer a cure to his elder brother.
But time goes on, a third son Ivan (Poupaud) is born, and now they are all grown-ups, then the matriarch Junon (Denueve) discovers that she suffers from the same disease, the only compatible donors are Henri and Elizabeth's son Paul (Berling), hence this Christmas, a family reunion is endowed with a more grave determinant, especially for the black sheep in the family Henri, after a 6-year banishment (due to an unspecified riff with Elizabeth), his return with his new Jewish girlfriend Faunia (Devos) will undoubtedly thrust the tension with Elizabeth's family and have an impact on Junon's final resolve to her impending treatment.Screen time is almost equally allotted to the all-star cast with their own stories intermingle in a short span of the time-line, although the main stream focuses on Henri and Junon's reconciliation, but it is not a beatific movie to bury the hatchet and embrace a pristine future, every family has its distinctive script written with plenitude of relatable interactions, notably, the mutual attraction between Ivan's wife Sylvia (played by Chiara Mastroianni, Denueve's real life daughter with Marcello Mastroianni) and Ivan's cousin Simon (Capelluto) clicks wonderfully in the latter part of the film, it is very French as well, for moralistic puritans and prudes, it is a sheer crevice in their convictions which will prompt harsh opprobrium.
Big, comfortable house in the provincial French town, white Christmas, family get-together.
Cold mother, dotting father that keeps everything together, and four kids, ever present long gone Joseph(died of cancer as a child), Elizabeth( successful playwright, but deeply unhappy), Paul (the proverbial black sheep ,drinks too much to want to control himself), and the youngest Ivan, (handsome, but timid with the history of mental troubles).
A long drawn-out tale of a father bringing his dysfunctional family together at Christmas after Mom is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
Rather than multiple plot lines, the story evolves around a simple family reunion at Christmas.
Catherine Deneuve plays Junon, the pivotal point of this ordinary dysfunctional (no oxymoron intended) family, a woman who years ago lost his 6-year-old son Joseph to a rare genetic ailment.
After several decades, she now falls victim to the same disease, and has less than six months to live unless she gets a bone marrow transplant from a family member.
The two older children, Elizabeth and Henri, had hated each other since childhood, partly because neither was compatible with Joseph to provide bone marrow transplant to save their dying brother.
Henri, played by Mathieu Amalric, is the black sheep of the family, always obnoxious, a drifter and a womanizer.
But it turns out that Henri is one of the only two compatible family members for the transplant.
After matriarch Junon is diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness her family comes together at Christmas in the hopes of putting things right.I've explained that badly, which is fine since I doubt there is any way I can truly do justice to this wonderful film about families, how they make us crazy, how they help us along and how life kind of gets in the way.
I loved the way that about a half hour into the film I knew I was going to have to watch this again because I was simply enjoying it so much.
This is a magical movie its worth the effort to see.I have to say I love that Catherine Deneuve, a babe if there ever was (and is one) is married to Jean-Paul Roussillon, a small squat almost troll like man.
Its brilliant, and its just a small element of a film that gets adults and families right.
He also has a tendency to use actors over and over - for example Manu Devos, Mathieu Amlaric and Catherine Deneuve all appeared in Kings and Queen, albeit Deneuve was little more than a cameo there whilst she here she gets centre stage as the matriarch of a dysfunctional family that makes Gene O'Neill's haunted Tyrones look like the Waltons.
The problem with Desplechin's films is also what makes me love them, i.e. their mental-ness.
Absolutely neurotic daughter who made her family banish her brother but never seems to wonder if maybe she messed up her own son's education.
And is played by a wonderful Catherine Deneuve and a never disappointing (except in James Bond) Mathieu Amalric.
"A Christmas Tale" has an intriguing premise - a family coming together for Christmas to find the cancer-stricken mum a bone marrow donor - but in spite of scenes which promise much, the whole movie doesn't really take off.
Not to mention many issues left hanging in the air.So the sister, at the end of the film, goes on hating his second brother without really understanding herself.
I loved the music and the jerky cinematic quality- making it look like a home movie at times.
In this respect, the cinematography reminds me a bit of Cousin Cousine and the shots of the family in that film at the party.The story was multi-layered.