Dir. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2008, 153 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Rouissillon, Anne Consigny
Review by Carol Allen
Were this a Hollywood movie about a dysfunctional family attempting to celebrate Christmas, you would get something with a few spats but basically warm and cuddly with a feelgood ending. But this is French, so forget warm and cuddly and think sharp teeth.
Abel (Rouissillon) and Junon (Deneuve) have three adult children. Henri (Amalric) was conceived in what turned out to be the false hope of saving his sibling Joseph from leukaemia. The boy died in infancy, leaving Henri with all that baggage and several years before the film's action Henri was banished from the family by his sister Elizabeth, for reasons no-one else knows. He is a drunk, Elizabeth (Consigny) a neurotic and the only stable family member appears to be the youngest son, Ivan (Melvil Poupard) and Junon's nephew Simon (Laurent Capelluoto), the self-appointed peacemaker, who struggles to keep all its disparate and warring members together. The reason for the family along with their various spouses being drawn together again is not just to celebrate Christmas but because Junon has discovered that she too is now suffering from leukaemia and hopes that one of them can provide the much needed bone marrow match. Doesn't look like being a merry one. In fact it's one of those Christmases, where skeletons pop out of the cupboard in droves.
The family history is charmingly and effectively filled in at the beginning with some clever use of animation but even so it takes a while for us to get to grips with who's who and what the film is really about. It's also sometimes a touch confusing. There are scenes for example of Elizabeth talking to presumably her therapist about being sterile and having lost her son and we then find out she has a son, the disturbed but charming and handsome adolescent Paul (Emile Berling). Is she just being self dramatising and metaphorical or is there another explanation? We never find out. Nor do we discover why Elizabeth hates Henri. All does though eventually sort of all fall into place and it's worth the work for the good performances.
Though her character's a bit of a pain, Consigny is engaging and Amalric as Henri, the black sheep, who's a bit of an amusing drama queen and his feisty girlfriend Faunia (Emanuelle Devos) are both great fun. So it's a pity that Faunia uses her Jewish origins as a reason to disappear from the scene before the knives really come out. Ivan is a real charmer and there's a lovely warm relationship between him and his nephew Paul. Deneuve as Junon is at the centre of it all — still a beautiful woman but so cold. Much of the family's dysfunctionality would appear to stem from her. There are some lovely comic touches, like when two of the small grandsons ingenuously ask Abel why his wife's so much younger than he is and in the way it's just casually dropped in via the sight of an old family photograph that the late Great Grandma's friend, the old lady, who's also with them for the festivities, was her lesbian lover. There's also a convincingly lived in feel to the old-fashioned French family home with its badly designed, unmodernised kitchen and the old fashioned stereo equipment playing vinyl LPs. You get the impression that it hasn't changed much since the children were born. The film is a touch long but is still interesting and intriguing throughout. |
