Cannes. A Christmas Tale.

"'Now that is a movie!' I exclaimed to a friend on exiting this morning's screening of Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte De Noël (A Christmas Story [site])."

Glenn Kenny: "The bourgeois-dysfunctional-family-comes-together-for-a-holiday setup is one of the hoariest in any medium, but if anybody can conjure something fresh out of it, it's Desplechin, and boy does he ever.... The creation of such a vivid, individualized group of characters and such a compelling roster of dilemmas is a staggering enough feat. But what makes this movie such a darkly exuberant feast is Desplechin's storytelling."

"Like so much of Desplechin's work, this combines a largely naturalistic story with a highly idiosyncratic approach," writes Andrew O'Hehir for Salon. "Characters address the camera directly, or narrate their letters before a photographer's backdrop. There's a puppet show, a children's play, bits of romantic fantasy and mock-noir montage - depicting the abundant nightlife of Roubaix, the provincial city in northern France where the story takes place - as well as quotations from Emerson, Nietzsche and Shakespeare and snippets from Funny Face, The Ten Commandments and other films I didn't catch.... IFC has acquired United States distribution rights, and I can only applaud the company's courage. This won't be an easy sell even to European audiences, and it's not likely to win the Palme d'Or. But if I see another film all year long that prickles me, disturbs me or moves me half as much, I'll be surprised."

"Desplechin's ambitious widescreen tale overflows with inescapable emotion, served both raw and endlessly reheated," writes Lisa Nesselson for Screen Daily. "Although Desplechin takes visual delight in framing his characters and juggling elaborate social geography, this is a talky affair and some delectably forthright dialogue illuminates many scenes.... Despite entrenched animosities and unrequited longings, Desplechin finds that change is possible in A Christmas Tale, lending a perverse buoyancy to the proceedings."

Competing.

Updates: "The film is as brilliant as it is cruel, and brings together the sweetness of intelligence and cinematic know-how with its characters' overflowing bitterness," writes Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa. "Its explosive elegance is near perfect, yet it successfully manages to keep the audience at an emotional distance."

"[V]ery French, very engrossing, often very funny, like a good, long novel you can't put down," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "One of the jokes is watching [Matthieu] Amalric and his Diving Bell co-star Anne Consigny as a brother and sister who detest each other; one of its joys is watching [Catherine] Deneuve play opposite her daughter Chiara Mastroianni - playing a daughter-in-law Denueve's character doesn't much like." All in all, a "rambunctious, imperfect joy of a movie."

"Unexpected but still made squarely in the French humanist tradition, this is a film you don't want to see end, not because the people are so happy but because they are so human and so alive," writes the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan.

"This could have been an emotionally wrenching film, but Desplechin keeps the tone light, infusing the drama with humor in the most unexpected places, and offers Henri's girlfriend, Faunia (frequent Desplechin actress Emmanuelle Devos), as the amused Shakespearean witness to the whole affair to lighten the heavy load," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical.

Derek Elley in Variety: "Film must be the only one ever to be inspired by a treatise on transplants: 'La greffe,' by psychoanalyst Jacques Ascher and hematologist Jean-Pierre Jouet. The notional center of the pic is, indeed, that: the search among the extended family of Junon Vuillard (Deneuve) for a compatible donor who can give her a bone-marrow transplant, and maybe extend her life for a couple of years. But Desplechin and co-scripter Emmanuel Bourdieu fail to transmute the material into anything really dramatic, touching on but not developing subsidiary themes like inherited guilt or familial debt owed to one's parents."

Updates, 5/17: "Desplechin is a past master at this sort of Chekhovian orchestration of multiple story lines," writes Bernard Besserglik in the Hollywood Reporter. "The danger, though, is of information (and sensory) overload as characters unburden themselves, sometimes at great length, in dialogue that often sparkles, though opinions might differ as to whether it is witty or merely febrile."

Reviews in German.

Updates, 5/18: "Desplechin's previous work, Kings and Queen, was the strongest French feature of the last five or six years," writes Patrick Z McGavin for Stop Smiling:

That film borrowed the structure of John Cassavetes's Love Streams. Every shot of the new work is electric and enthralling and reaches a musical buoyancy and novelistic density. Stylistically, the film is so imaginatively conceived and constructed: The story, character detail and emotional force are conveyed through a collage of dovetailing flashbacks, iris shots, family photographs, musical interpolations, direct-address confessions and a shadow puppet précis of the family's tragic past.

[...]

At two and a half hours, every moment is unexpected — the depths of characterization, humor and verve never fail to astonish. It has moments of incredible pain, conveying a sense of transience and emotional fragility that is alternately revealing, observant and continually alive.

"Desplechin takes the holiday reunion melodrama and flips its every which way, cutting away from scenes before you expect and utilizing a host of cinematic tricks, from irises to direct-camera monologues to enliven the proceedings," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "The result is vertiginous and anything but expected. Witty, profound and highly literate - with references from A Midsummer's Night Dream to Friedrich Nietzsche, the film is both a uniquely emotional and intellectual experience, as much about familial relationships as death, despair and madness."

Updates, 5/19: "I swear, it filled me with unadulterated joy," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Un Conte de Noël feels long and windy at first, especially since Desplechin must set up so much backstory and entrenched hostility," writes Erica Abeel at Filmmaker. "But the longer you sit, the more you get roped in.... This won't win me many friends, but I have a beef against Amalric and how he always plays the same loony, no matter the film (and [he] should consider washing his hair). I've also lost patience with Emannuelle Devos (cast as his girlfriend), equally enamored of and always ... Emmanuelle."

"Though the interlocking stories are in and of themselves banal, what is tremendously sophisticated here is Desplechin's overlapping style, and the rigor which Desplechin applies as an overarching mirror to the subject," writes Facets' Milos Stehlik.

Updates, 5/21: "As convoluted as it is superbly acted, Desplechin's ensemble piece inevitably acknowledges Renoir's Rules of the Game (although, in staging a prolonged house party, it inexplicably leaves out the downstairs component)," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "At once avant and retro, A Christmas Tale is the sort of Palm-friendly movie-movie Desplechin's admirers always thought he could contrive."

"It's exciting cinema, but it can just as easily be seen as unfocused as thrilling," writes writes Matt Noller at the House Next Door. "Still, even if Un conte de Noël sometimes (okay, frequently) seems more than a little messy, there's enough life on display here that it's hard to begrudge Desplechin his excesses."

"Desplechin seems to be going for the old French New Wave recipe of emotional warmth and cinematic wizardry," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "But the soufflé doesn't quite rise. This is faux Truffaut."

Update, 5/22: "As a fan of Desplechin's Esther Kahn and someone who admired, but had doubts, about his frantic Kings and Queen, I was won over instantly by this engrossing, novelistic family melodrama, which finds Desplechin channeling his virtuosity into a more stable structure," writes Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out Chicago.

Update, 5/23: James Mottram profiles Deneuve for the London Times.

Update, 5/25: A review from Ronald Bergan.

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 16, 2008 7:46 AM