Un Conte de Noël.

In Un Conte de Noël, Arnaud Desplechin has tried to instill new life into the well-worn formula of the family reunion. In fact, there is an echo, surely unintentional, of TS Eliot's second play in which the dying mother is told, "Death will come to you as a mild surprise." Here, the dying mater familias is the Junoesque Catherine Deneuve, who plays a character called Junon, in a detached manner. Yet, despite the strong cast, the cautious avoidance of melodrama, the often wry Rohmeresque dialogue, the film remains as traditional as its title suggests. The director seems so careful to avoid the clichés of the genre, that he only draws attention to them. The convoluted screenplay with its skeletons rattling in the closet, the dysfunctional family made up of insecure odd balls, the redemptive theme with its religious undertones, are all there.

Desplechin's efforts to trick out the mise-en-scene with lite Godardian effects such as characters addressing the camera, voice over, and quotes from literature as well as using titles, shadow puppets, irises, an eclectic choice of music from classical to jazz, to Irish and Indian melodies, smack of a certain desperation.

Paradoxically, all these cinematic devices with vague nods towards La Nouvelle Vague, and a screenplay that acknowledges La Regle du Jeu and Ingmar Bergman's family dramas, plus inconsequential clips from films watched by the characters on television - Max Reinhardt's film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn's incidental music for the play is also often used on the soundtrack), Funny Face and DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments (curiously dubbed into French with French subtitles), Un Conte de Noël remains rooted in the theater. It is in the line of the above-mentioned A Family Reunion, but further back to Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra and its obvious antecedents and superficially to Chekhov.

It might have worked as a play, but as a film it is the kind of highly-wrought middle-of-the-road artifact - neither too commercial nor too avant-garde - that may gain a festival prize or two, if not the Palme d'Or, and a relatively large audience.

- Ronald Bergan

Posted by dwhudson at May 25, 2008 3:54 AM