“A Christmas Tale,” starring Catherine Deneuve, is a French tale about a dysfunctional family at Christmas. Running at an interminable two-and-a-half hours, the intricate (and often confusing) family relationships and endless emotional baggage are exhausting even if you enjoy French films. Junon (Deneuve), the matriarch of the gloomy Vuillard family, has been recently diagnosed with leukemia and is looking for a bone marrow donor for an experimental treatment. Her illness evokes memories of the death of her eldest son, Joseph, more than 40 years ago, a tragedy that still haunts the family. Daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a successful playwright, is currently undergoing treatment for depression. Henri (Mathiew Amalric, the villain in “Quantum of Solace”), the black sheep of the family, has been banished by his sister in exchange for settling his monetary debts. And the youngest son is Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), who seems nonchalant when he discovers that his wife has slept with his cousin Christmas night.
The script has a lot of side stories going on, which only serve to add confusion, not create memorable moments or emotional engagement. The most agreeable character is Junon’s unlikely husband, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), who is short and overweight but the only one who consistently displays any common sense. And as much as I like foreign films, it’s a tedious chore reading subtitles for 150 minutes in “A Christmas Tale.”
1 comment:
I think the makers of this film thought that asking a disowned member of a family back into their good graces in order to get his bone marrow would make for a good story. All I saw was a twisted, disjointed French language drama that was hard to follow (hard to follow even if it were in english)I can't understand some critics liking this film??!! (1 1/2 analysts)
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