A Christmas Tale.

"Arnaud Desplechin is a cinema maximalist," writes J Hoberman in the Voice: "A Christmas Tale feels like all 12 days of seasonal merriment, and then some. This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama, shown last month in the New York Film Festival, is a heady plum pudding of a movie - studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The concoction is over-rich, yet irresistible."

"Mercurial, multifarious, and burgeoning with detail, A Christmas Tale builds upon the manic catharses of Desplechin's last feature, Kings and Queen, to create a holiday movie in extremis, in which death, disease, and mental illness cozily share the table with music, religious pageantry, and romantic and familial love," writes Leo Goldsmith for indieWIRE. "Assembling a veritable who's who of French cinematic royalty (Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni), contemporary French-movie stalwarts (Hippolyte Girardot, Melvil Poupaud, Anne Consigny), and Desplechin's repertory players (Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Jean-Paul Roussillon), the film creates an expansive portrait of the Vuillard family, its divergent mythologies, its power struggles, and its histories of mental and physical illness."

Updated through 11/17.

"Arnaud Desplechin makes movies that play like epic novels built out into live-sized pop-up books," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Virtually Cubist in their multi-faceted narrative complexity, they cast such a spell that they're almost interactive. When you watch a Desplechin film, you can smell perfume and feel bass shaking a room, and you feel the burden of each character's long-simmering loves and resentments as if they were your own. Beyond surround sound, it's surround space, surround time, surround life."

"Is A Christmas Tale a masterpiece?" asks David Edelstein in New York. "Maybe. I have to play with it longer. It's certainly Desplechin's most accessible film, in part because its dysfunctional-family-holiday-reunion genre is so comfy and its palette so warm.... Desplechin might be the most earnest ironist alive."

"Like his countryman Christophe Honoré (Dans Paris, Love Songs) - and, of course, their New Wave forbears - Desplechin undercuts the grave subject matter with a playfulness of form," writes Henry Stewart in the L Magazine. "He has a knack with actors, and for up-close, liberated filmmaking, but he has little sense of how to fit the pieces together."

"A Christmas Tale is a film experience to be seen and savored for its exquisite delineation of human feelings and foibles," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"A Christmas Tale brilliantly captures the melancholy and familial recrimination that, for some people, is as much a part of the holiday season as fruitcake and egg nog," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Desplechin "about he film's distinctly American genre, why Michael Mann fascinates him and Angela Bassett's derrière."

For FilmInFocus, Tom Hall talks with Desplechin about "the role that film has played in his own development as an artist."

Eric Hynes talks with Desplechin for Reverse Shot.

For the L Magazine, Nicolas Rapold "recently spoke with the utterly warm and friendly filmmaker."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and New York; and "Klawans on Desplechin" and Desplechin's conversation with Deneuve for Film Comment.

Updates, 11/13: "[B]y all means, go to A Christmas Tale, forewarned and forearmed with a working knowledge of Bergman, Rohmer, Truffaut, The Royal Tenenbaums and Home for the Holidays, as well as a batch of European poets, playwrights and philosophers you probably haven't read in a long while," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "They're all in there, and you can spend the movie decoding to your little hipster's heart's content - or you can sit back and absorb, knowing that Desplechin asks of his audience only an open mind and a receptivity to constant redefinition of the situation."

"Why is Desplechin worshipped by the gatekeepers of contemporary film culture?" ask, yes, Armond White in the New York Press. "The answer is annoyingly apparent in A Christmas Tale, where Desplechin glamorizes a haute-bourgeois French family, serving up domestic banalities with more than a soupçon of intellectual loftiness."

Updates, 11/14: "Mr Desplechin has a positive genius for making his carefully structured tales seem breathless and aleatory, as if any given film were plucked almost at random from dozens of other possibilities," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The result, in the case of A Christmas Tale, is a movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty - marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche - and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being."

"I can think of no other filmmaker who simultaneously bewilders and moves me in the way French director Arnaud Desplechin does," writes Stephanie Zacharek. "As I watched his latest picture, A Christmas Tale - its French title is Un conte de Noël - I felt the same degree of wariness and trepidation as I did watching his previous feature, the equally wondrous Kings and Queen (2005): Am I really understanding what's going on with these characters? Is any of this really connecting? Only to realize, in the seemingly uneventful thunderclap of the last sequence, that everything has come together with perfect clarity - and that I want to burst into tears."

Also in Salon: Andrew O'Hehir interviews Desplechin.

"A Christmas Tale revels in the dense, layered backstory it has created for its central family, worshipping the legends of the Vuillard history as giant moments imbued with Significance and Meaning," writes Zachary Wigon in the Auteurs' Notebook. "However, as the film goes on, we realize that there is nothing remarkable about these stories... It's true that the way the film approaches the story is far more important than the story itself, but the film's formal approach can only sustain itself for so long before its magic wears off. This is true for any film. And as Desplechin should know, when the magic wears off is when the movie should end."

Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York: "The secret to the success of A Christmas Tale, for all its fatalism, is how closely it reminds you of other cozy cinematic gatherings: A spiky harpsichord burbles on the soundtrack like in The Royal Tenenbaums; Bergman's Fanny and Alexander isn't far from mind, or even Home Alone, when a major character goes missing (not for long) in the snowy third act."

"It seemed to me as I left the theater that A Christmas Tale was a little too jumpy for its own good, with too many characters and plot points hastily interwoven," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "But I've come think that it is faithful to its essential purpose, which is to disprove the Tolstoyan dictum that unhappy families are each miserable in their own ways. We do see something instructive about ourselves in this melodramatically grumbling group."

"It's the definition of a film meant to be admired more than loved, but Desplechin's fierce intelligence and uncompromising sense of character come through, as does some of the sharp wit and stylistic flourishes left over from his last film, 2004's Kings and Queen," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "Nothing can sound more familiar, or more banal, than the subject of A Christmas Tale, yet nothing could be more energizing, more captivating, more pure pleasure on screen than the passionate, evocative experience that has resulted."

Online listening tip. Deneuve is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"A Christmas Tale doesn't synthesize everything Desplechin's been working on since 1991's La Vie Des Morts - how could any one film capture the scope of Desplechin's relentlessly schizophrenic interests? - but it's the most coherent alchemy of Morts, My Sex Life and Kings and Queen we're ever likely to get." Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door: "It's not dilution; it's clarity."

Online viewing tips. Karina Longworth gathers clips from other Deneuve performances.

"Esther Kahn: Notes on the Beloved Object" from Dan Sallitt.

Updates, 11/15: "A Desplechin movie, like life, is a collaborative enterprise, and so along with [cinematographer Eric] Gautier, and frequent cowriter Emmanuel Bourdieu, credit's due to his editor, Laurence Briaud, who in interviews the director has credited with helping him find the best parts of varied performances, and 'creating this sort of free, jazz space.'" Mark Asch for Stop Smiling: "Never knowing where the next shot might come from is how Desplechin - whose production company is called Why Not Productions - can use a cut-out puppet show or direct address for exposition, or punctuate a scene with iris effects, freeze-frames, split-screens, deadpan long shots or melodramatic high-angles, black-and-white stills (his family, all actors, have grown up on camera, making for an ample photo album). The filmmaking is a state of flux; so are the lives."

"Yes, this is another nutty family film (seen Rachel Getting Married?), but Desplechin has made certain his delicious cast understands its individual roles to perfection," writes James Van Maanen.

"[I]t's Desplechin's most sober and controlled film so far," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "Less promisingly, it also marks the first time he's repeated himself."

Update, 11/16: Graham Fuller talks with Deneuve for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 11/17: "Watching A Christmas Tale, with its bursts of old movies, dregs of empty bottles, lines from books, and fragments of half-forgotten conversations, is like getting to know a family other than your own by leafing through its scrapbooks and laughing at its photograph albums, while it bickers in the next room over stuff you may never understand," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2008 8:07 AM