Arnaud Desplechin’s mercurial, knotty and cinematically vibrant drama of family dysfunction stirred up over a Christmas gathering was the top film of my Best of the Year list in 2008. Now A Christmas Tale (Criterion) arrives on DVD in a presentation worthy of it. Directing with an even more restless energy than he showed in Kings and Queen, Desplechin sketches out a family tragedy, the untimely death of a first-born, that precedes the story by decades and then only overtly references it a few times, even as the shadow of that death hovers over the film: in the cancer that family matron Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with, in the fragility of her teenage grandson Paul (Emile Berling), and in the odd sibling dynamics that have caused eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) to, in effect, legally separate herself from her brother Ivan (Mathieu Amalric, in a mesmerizingly manic-depressive performance).

Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve

“Henri is the disease,” she tells us in one of the film’s direct address monologues, but perhaps the disease is in the blood – the same disease that killed Joseph at age six, the same disease that will eventually kill her mother (even with a bone marrow transplant, which will only give her a few more years; they have the mathematical formula to prove it!), and maybe the same disease that haunts her own son, Paul. For whatever reasons, Paul seeks out his outcast Uncle Henri and invites him to the family Christmas he’s been banished from for five years; this helps stir up quite a holiday nog, complete with a brutal little brawl and a bit of adultery that may come some way to smoothing over a few emotional rough patches.

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My first Top Ten list of 2008 went up as part of MSN Entertainment’s “Year in Review” poll. Due to deadlines, it was put together a week ago, before I had the opportunity to see some of the late 2008 films. But it’s a list I can stand by.

You can find my list – and those of all the MSN writers participating in the “Year in Review” poll – at MSN here.

All the participants also contributed an essay on one of the films in the compilation list. Here is mine: A Christmas Tale.

The title may sound generic, but Arnaud Desplechin’s mercurial “A Christmas Tale” spikes the punch of the familiar heartwarming family drama: It’s a turbulent journey into the emotional maelstrom of a fractured French clan during the Christmas holidays.

You’ll be reading more about this one from me as the lists continue.

Mathieu Amalric throws himself into "A Christmas Tale"

Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale) (dir: Arnaud Desplechin)

Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel) is my favorite film of the year to date and perhaps the popular breakthrough this French director deserves.  It’s the story of a family coming together for Christmas and the conflicts the erupt, but that’s as close as this film gets to the familiar comedies of dysfunctional families reluctantly gathering for the holidays and colliding in slapstick scenes. This is a film of delirious details, great and small, that layer in the complicated relations and complex emotional histories of siblings and parents and cousins and loved ones. Explanations only offer a surface understanding. It’s the way in which these folks act and react and interact that tells us who they are. The why is left to us to ponder.

Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve

It’s a lively and dynamic drama played out under the shadow of death: in the untimely death of a first-born (played out in flashback via shadow puppets, an odd device that brings a touching sadness to the memory), in the cancer that is killing family matron Junon (Catherine Deneuve), in the odd sibling dynamics that has caused eldest Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) to, in effect, legally separate herself from her brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric, in a mesmerizingly manic-depressive performance), in the fragility of Elizabeth’s teenage grandson Paul (Emile Berling).

I review the film at Parallax View:

This is neither a farce of dysfunctional collisions nor a family drama where dredging up past sins and misunderstandings leads to teary reconciliations. It’s about the messy space inhabited by loved ones who will never know or understand everything about each other (or, for that matter, themselves) and may never overcome their own impulses (rational or irrational) and emotional reflexes. For all the prickly relations, Desplechin’s mix of joy and sadness and generosity and selfishness and forgiveness and blame is beautiful and celebratory.

I also review the film at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here.

Days and Clouds (dir: Silvio Soldini)

Margherita Buy and Antonio Albanese are an upper-middle-class couple whose entire world is turned upside down when the husband loses his job and struggles with his sense of shame and impotence, finding so much of his identity defined by his career and his ability to support his family.

Soldini doesn’t play the ordeal for melodrama. His sensitivity to depression and pride is nicely measured, and the performers bring a subtlety to the complicated emotions. But his awareness doesn’t probe much beneath the surface of a married couple whose aspirations are subsumed by their desperation to hold on to the status quo.

I review the film for the Seattle P-I here.

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I’m back and almost recovered from the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

I got off to a slow start at TIFF this year, at least in terms of writing. After nine films in two days, I got hit with a bad bout of something and was knocked flat by fever, nausea, insomnia and other things you don’t want to read about, losing a day and a half of screenings. After a partial recovery, I went right back to the movies, where at least I found some distraction, though I never quite recovered the stamina that got me through an average of four films a day in 2007 (where a cold slowed me down but never actually stopped me from getting to a screening or getting something written every day).

I did however get a few things written – a mid-fest overview for the Seattle P-I and a couple of dispatches for GreenCine – and hope to get a few more things written in the next few days. But mostly I’m back to the DVD column and the film review grind, and I have interviews to work into pieces for the coming weeks.

Here’s where you can find my coverage:

GreenCine Dispatches:

September 10

Many of the films that most captured my affections at TIFF this year revolve around family, notably extended family reunited for a special occasion: a holiday, a remembrance, a celebration. Four filmmakers in particular created rich tapestries of these familiar yet elusive collective organisms, examining how the past reverberates through the immediacy of the present, even when we think we fully understand that past.

The most mercurial and vibrant and cinematically exciting is Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël), which premiered at Cannes and makes its North American debut here. Directing with an even more restless energy than he showed in Kings and Queen, Desplechin sketches out a family tragedy, the untimely death of a first-born, that precedes the story by decades and then only overtly references it a few times, even as the shadow of that death hovers over the film: in the cancer that family matron Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with, in the fragility of her teenage grandson Paul (Emile Berling), and in the odd sibling dynamics that have caused eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) to, in effect, legally separate herself from her brother Ivan (Mathieu Amalric, in a mesmerizingly manic-depressive performance).

Mathieu Amalric in "Un Conte de Noel"

“Henri is the disease,” she tells us in one of the film’s direct address monologues, but perhaps the disease is in the blood – the same disease that killed Joseph at age six, the same disease that will eventually kill her mother (even with a bone marrow transplant, which will only give her a few more years; they have the mathematical formula to prove it!), and maybe the same disease that haunts her own son, Paul. For whatever reasons, Paul seeks out his outcast Uncle Henri and invites him to the family Christmas he’s been banished from for five years; this helps stir up quite a holiday nog, complete with a brutal little brawl and a bit of adultery that may come some way to smoothing over a few emotional rough patches.

I also write about Olivier Assayas’ L’heure d’ete (Summer Hours), Hirozaku Kore-Eda’s Still Walking and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Read the complete dispatch here.

September 12

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the American line-up at TIFF 2008 was singularly lacking in heft and ambition. Just a year after such challenges and delights as No Country for Old Men, Into the Wild and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, not to mention the sheer fun of Juno, the absence of almost any American film striving for something with courage and conviction and evocative storytelling to match is, to say the least, a disheartening sign for a festival that is supposed to launch the Oscar season.

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