A Christmas Tale (French): Dysfunctional family h(e)aven?

★★★★★★★★☆☆

Now how unassumingly elegant is this! Imagine The Royal Tenenbaums [without Wes Anderson's screaming "oh we are so quirky and dysfunctional, look at us: we are so funny!"] meets Noam Baumbach via some over-plotting courtesy Almodovar. Apologies for the references to communicate this movie’s flavour, but Arnaud Desplechin’s work has eluded me till now, and I was so humbly surprised at the gorgeous, equipoised kitchen sink drama he’s created with such heart-rendingly warm strokes, I just had to say I absolutely heart the guy’s work.

A couple next door has a son with a rare lymphoma. He dies and they go on and have three more. They all grow in different directions, two boys and a girl, eliciting varying degrees of love, attention from their parents and each other, until an inexplicable hatred takes form between the sister and the elder brother and takes such a shape that when we meet these two characters some 20 years on, as the sister is bailing out his brother by paying all his debts in court, she explicitly keeps the condition of never seeing him from that day on. Banished from the family, the brother [played by Mathieu Amalric] already reeling from his wife’s death, drifts about until five years later when the materfamilias of the main family is diagnosed with a rare cancer which sends all the kids and the grandkids into blood and marrow testing frenzy to find a compatible donor. With Christmas on the anvil, the father of the family decides to invite all the three kids with their respective families, and as is predictable, a good amount of dirty linen gets cleaned over the four-five days.

The film is endearingly patient and the director’s out to capture the littlest of ways family members seek out to each other: reacting to each other’s idiosyncracies; having dinner table arguments; scoffing, sharing, insulting, entertaining, confronting, punching, persecuting, then reconciling; reveling in each other’s fortunes and misfortunes in the year gone by; getting exasperated and finding oxygen by driving each other mental with grudges of the past and  snuggling into the warmth of some random shared nostalgia respectively: it’s all here in this true-to-life snapshot of three generations brought under one roof for five days. All of it suffused by Desplechin’s feather-light touch, his use of snug interior glow to light up shots, and some beautiful background score [it helps the family in question-Vuillards, everyone plays an instrument].

The psychological accuracy and eloquence one witnesses in a disillusioned brother’s letter to his embittered sister or the way the head of the family quotes from a work alluding about the nature of knowing oneself when asked by his daughter what she’s lost and why she’s so misunderstood are just some of the choicest moments when you get to appreciate how beautifully written this film is.

The rest of the running time, just watching members of this family interacting with and interpreting each other  is where the movie draws almost all its charm. And the good thing is they all have a terrific sense of humour. The whole ensemble is natural to the core. Catherine Denueve as the mother-head is class personified, Mathieu Amalric who I thought I could never visualise as anything but as Jean-Dominique Bauby in the last year tour-de-force Diving Bell and the Butterfly seamlessly melts into another compelling male-portrait and is everybit the misunderstood brother/ignored son as Herni could be, and as the seething with bile sister Elizabeth, Anne Consigny manages to elicit sympathy. Besides, I’d wonder who could watch JP Rousillon and not reminisce about their own grandparents. What’s also endearing is Desplechin’s care for detail for all the distressful medical procedures that the family members have to go through, so you have Amalric flashing his bandaged derrieré, Denueve getting her sternum marked and stabbed for bone marrow biopsy and a small montage of meiosis under a microscope.

So there you have it, a supremely identifiable tragicomedy about lymphoma, schizophrenia, diametrically opposite siblings, Christmas, overmelancholic parents, brothers deciding amongst themselves who’s most deserving of a girl they all have fallen for (or slept with) and also about Christmas wine, Christmas decorations, dinners, Midsummer’s Night Dream on TV, long night walks in snow, midnight masses and moms connecting with their boys’ girls and wives and grandads giving grandchildren warm baths and uncles forgetting their nephews’ names. Cinema verité of the most universal resonance.

Sublime, honest and absorbing, Un Conte De Noel AKA A Christmas Tale is one film to cherish. Released in 2008 amidst some other equally compelling dysfunctional family dramas like Rachel Getting Married and Margot at the Wedding, catch its trailer here:

Flight of the Red Balloon (French)

“Soothing urban stream-of-consciousness contemplative piece from France that had so much familiar warmth and an awesome visual motif of a red round balloon wafting around the town with beautiful piano solos in the background (I have a thing for seeing balloons bump and fly since I was a kid), always within reach of the young boy of a perennially-rushed mother.

The abstract edifice of this otherwise homely drama gives it a surreal beauty that I’ve learned to associate more with Ki-Duk Kim and other masters of the East. Loved the characters: Juliette Binoche gives what I can say my favourite performance of hers: she’s so endearing in that ruffled, all-blonde-hair mom burning the candle at all ends, losing it at her husbands’friend-cum-freeloading tenant, missing her writer-hubby who’s neglecting her in Montreal, a daughter who’s in Brussels and is delaying her homecoming… to see her juggle all of this, call up piano tuners, buy presents, do the strenous voice-acting in her puppets show, indulge in nostalgia as she gifts a postcard and rejoice silently as she comfortingly communicates with her son, and you just sit back and wonder at the misconception that everyday life isn’t rife with drama and beauty. Its all in the eye of the film-maker. Besides the complex, layered improvised drama, the beauty captured in perplexingly complex compositions through the camera like the sunset through a stained train window is done so keenly and yet without a trifle of ostentation that made me just marvel. And the use of red colour, the choice of perspectives, the dialogue, the wit: the director goes as far as taking two endearing stabs at himself, one by placing a Chinese au pair at the center of the drama and then by making her a film-student who is making a movie about red balloons too and (this is the second one) comments on post-production trickery about the red balloon wafting about in the metropolis. Imaginative and timeless!

I’ve Loved you So Long(French)

Classy, dignified heartfelt French number with a devastating central performance from the angelic Kristin Thomas (remember English Patient?), who packs in so much pathos as Juliette, a mother convicted of killing her son and who’s spent 15 years for her crime and is just released, right from the first close-up, that you are sold. And then this delicate story unfolds, peopled with terrifically real characters, brimming with genuine family bonhomie and with astute care, one by one, old wounds are peeled, penetrating questions asked until the wonderfully paced yarn reaches its climax for the revelation of the mercy killing, and it doesn’t disappoint one bit. Not that you’ll be watching the flick for the climax for there’s enough matter in this ex-convict fitting in and finding her niche in the society and enough enigma in Thomas’ pained and veiled eyes and demeanour to keep you hooked. Wonderfully written, perfectly pitched drama (debutante director, really!!) that’s a definite collector’s item.”