This will be an unpopular opinion, but we’re still formulating it, so hang tight. Now that a clip from Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale” (“Un Conte De Noël”) has surfaced online via Indiwire (via Spout) it gives us a place to discuss the film which we saw last week, one that was crackling with life and honesty and at the same time rather infuriating.
We went into it not knowing much. We know it screened at Cannes, we knew it was about family at Xmas time and that it was seemingly well-received and that’s it (but it didn’t win any major awards so it wasn’t exactly on our radar, though we did try and see it at NYFF).
Well it turns out that critics seemed to adore the film, and it received strong reviews at Cannes. “It filled me with unadulterated joy,” said the New York Times’ A.O. Scott. “Unexpected but still made squarely in the French humanist tradition, this is a film you don’t want to see end, not because the people are so happy but because they are so human and so alive,” wrote the Los Angeles Times‘ Kenneth Turan.
About a dysfunctional bourgeoisie family that heads home for Christmas, but by the nature of being French, ‘Noël,’ easily tweaks the very -American, “coming home for the holidays” genre.
But the French are nasty with one another and “A Christmas Tale,” gave us a bit of a headache, both emotionally and aesthetically. In fact it’s reminiscent of the brutal family tone of “Margot At The Wedding” meets the artful lyricism of “The Diving Bell And The Butterfly,” two films that we absolutely adored last year.
Many critics were turned off by the ugliness of Noah Baumbach’s family drama, and we were similarly repulsed, but enthralled with the horrible family dynamics as well. But much like some of the schizophrenic and emotionally-troubled characters within the ‘Christmas Tale’ (played by the likes of Mathieu Almaric, Catherine Deneuve and her lovely daughter Chiara Mastroianni; yes the daughter of good ol’ Marcelllo), the filmmaking was similarly oblique and slanted and the editing sometimes felt like it suffered from tourettes. The music was sometimes painfully jarring, and the pacing was arrhythmic.
Obviously these conceits were purposefully made and frankly, creative techniques like this generally give us cinema boners, but here we felt that they were impressionistic, but also like raging with amphetamines at times. Almaric’s character was so damn insufferable, when he gets punched in the face we practically cheered!
But here’s the thing: this film hasn’t left us since we’ve seen it and we keep rolling it around in or head over and over again: resonance is always an important sign to shelf life for a film. But basically we’re saying, this is an interesting worthwhile film, but one that’s not entirely unproblematic. It’s 2 and a half hour running time makes some of the dysfunction an emotional slog too. Perhaps that sounds like we hated it, but no, we’d probably give it a B-ish grade once it settles in our stomach and head, but we had to get out what annoyed us about this film first. There will be more to come. Check out this scene, there’s a lot of great humor in the film too that we’ll get to in a real review soon.