A Christmas Tale
A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel), Desplechin’s latest, is a darkly comic dysfunctional family fairy tale, more Meet Me In Saint Louis than The Royal Tenenbaums, with a healthy dose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in. With its whimsies and excesses playing out under the oddly liberating spectre of expected death, the whole thing is infused with a fin de siecle sensibility.
While ailing matriarch is Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) infuriatingly matter-of-fact regarding what may be her own last holiday (she explains the seriousness of her condition to her husband in their warmly-lit budoir, backed by the strains of cafe jazz), her grown-up kids reflexively take the reminder of the ticking clock as an opportunity for boozy, reckless revelry, as an excuse to fight and to stop fighting repressed desires. Weird, warm, gleefully funny and unavoidably heartrending, this grand tale of a family reunited by mortality is, in it’s most impressive trick, not a bit morose. To borrow a line from Desplechin himself, speaking after a screening at the New York Film Festival, the Vuillards “don’t have time for melancholy”; to borrow a line from his script, “suffering is a painted backdrop” for the business of getting through the day………
Cast
Junon – Catherine Deneuve
Abel – Jean-Paul Roussillon
Elizabeth – Anne Consigny
Henri – Mathieu Amalric
Ivan – Melvil Poupaud
Claude – Hippolyte Girardot
Faunia – Emmanuelle Devos
Sylvia – Chiara Mastroianni
Simon – Laurent Capelluto
Paul – Emile Berling
Basile – Thomas Obled
Baptiste – Clement Obled
Rosaimee – Francoise Bertin
Spetafora – Samir Guesmi
Dr. Zraidi – Azize Kabouche
A Christmas Tale (2008) movie trailer
You may also like to read:
Tags: A Christmas Tale, Hollywood Movie, Review
04 April 2010 12:04pm - Entertainment ||
