Word: desplechin
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...Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin's richly populated film about a fractious family gathering for the holidays in a provincial city. Deneuve is the curiously calm matriarch and least neurotic member of this brood. She needs a bone-marrow transplant if she is to survive the sudden onset of leukemia, which is something of a family curse. The best donor possibility is, naturally, one of her kin. The trouble is that they are apparently more interested in their own petty feuds than they are in rescuing her. That's especially true of Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a glum playwright who, several years...
...film is full of slightly weird children, plus a certain amount of sexual tension - you may be an in-law, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're sexually uninteresting to someone else in the crowded family manse - but none of this turns A Christmas Tale into a farce. Desplechin is aware of the humorous cross-currents in the film, but he's not out to exploit them. He's a more serious filmmaker than that, interested in exploring the wayward, occasionally inexplicable tensions of a group bound together more by the accidents of birth than by any true communality...
...CHRISTMAS TALE. Arnaud Desplechin...
...find in many family reunions: musical beds, generational scores-settling and the ripping off of psychic scabs. Amid all the melodrama - Junon has liver cancer and needs a bone-marrow transplant from someone of her blood - the conversation is bantering, often affectionate. In this chatty 2-1/2hr. film, Desplechin (Kings and Queen) seems to be going for the old French New Wave recipe of emotional warmth and cinematic wizardry. But the souffl? doesn't quite rise. This is faux Truffaut...
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