NYFF. A Christmas Tale.

"Arnaud Desplechin doesn't so much direct movies as conduct marathons," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Packed with frantic gestures, free-associative allusions and titanic meltdowns, his films are unwieldy, bracingly omnivorous creatures—as exhilarating as they are exhausting. A Christmas Tale [site] crams enough drama in its preamble (sibling rivalry, deaths, a family's history of illness) for two or three productions, and that's just the backstory for this sprawling yet intimate portrait of a tension-cracked familial get-together."

"Returning to the recurring themes of parental alienation and surrogacy of La Vie des morts, Playing 'In the Company of Men' and Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale is a quintessential Arnaud Desplechin film in its ingenious, heady collision of disparate, often contradictory, yet integrally interconnected forms," agrees Acquarello.

"The French Cinema Now revival screening of Arnaud Desplechin's rarely (if ever) seen first feature film Life of the Dead (La vie des morts, 1991) was a welcome meditation on the presence of the oak in the acorn," writes Michael Guillén in San Francisco. "It proved to be a perfect companion piece to A Christmas Tale for prefiguring many of the themes and methods expressed more fully in Desplechin's critically-acclaimed recent work, including a family gathering pulled into the gravitational field of the death horizon via an attempted suicide." Michael's also got notes from the Q&A with Desplechin following the screening of A Christmas Tale.

"Watching the spirited and melancholy A Christmas Tale is like listening to the somber transcendence of 'Silent Night' (with a dash of Vince Guaraldi)," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. "Even those minor threads and beats that don't cohere or convince... at least function well rhythmically - like little riffs in Desplechin's overall freeform creation. Imminent tragedy and bumbling slapstick buffer each other, cynicism and poetic optimism... exist side by side, cradled in harmony, all through the night. It's Christmas, and families are on the mend; people are on the verge of some greater understanding of themselves and each other. At least until New Year's."

"A Christmas Tale is the French cinematic equivalent of a cozy, okay in its own right, but there isn't really a mystery and there certainly isn't an able sleuth to delve into the modest behavioral conundrums kept ever so slightly at bay," finds Ed Champion.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and, from Toronto, Sean Axmaker.

Update: "Each in succession, the curiosities of A Christmas Tale burst from the surface of the film, almost incapable of containing themselves, their passions, their disappointments, their awkward eruptions of alcoholic rage and familial resentment," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Desplechin's characters - with their many moods and emotions, problems and intrigues - are difficult to contain, a family of exuberants and melancholiacs; drunks and despots; healers and romantics; mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.... Each character stakes his own narrational claim over their part of the tale."

Update, 10/20: Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video of the Q&A with Desplechin.

Update, 10/22: Online listening tip. Film Comment's Andrew Chan talks with Desplechin.

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2008 6:36 AM