A Christmas Tale On Criterion!

Out on DVD is a terrific French film, A Christmas Tale. The Vuillard family is a dizzyingly complex dysfunctional French family who have returned home for the Christmas holidays and for their mother (Catherine Deneuve) who is desperately ill and in need of a bone marrow transplant. But there are emotional land mines at every turn. The death of a baby brother hangs over the family like a shroud. Eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) hasn't spoken to her fuck-up of a brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric) in six years, and her her own son Paul (Emile Berling) seems severely disturbed. Youngest son Ivan (Melvil Pourpaud), with wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), still has unresolved issues with cousin Simon (Laurent Cappelluto). In Arnaud Desplechin (Kings And Queens)'s messy, sweepingly novelistic approach, the humorous absurdities and unresolved traumas rise up and ebb throughout the course of the holiday in unexpected and emotionally exhausting ways. As a director, his approach is always to keeps you slightly off-balance. But this magnificent tapestry about these tormented, talented "Gallic Tenenbaums" is both fascinating and heart-wrenching. Denueve is almost as formidable as she is beautiful here, and the wildly talented Amalric (The Diving Bell And The Butterfly) is thrilling as the sadsack screw-up son.