Christmas with the Romans

Your mother. At Christmas. Played by Catherine Deneuve.

We turn now to A Christmas Tale, directed by Arnaud Desplechin. Yes, directed: we continue our tradition of ending the year with a slightly unconventional holiday film rather than a tome of world history. Names like Deneuve and Desplechin tip us that the film is French, which means that if, like me, you don’t speak the language, you’ll have to read a few subtitles. …Oh, come back here, and quit rolling your eyes: you’ll read less copy in the course of the film than you’ll read in the course of this review. Plus, all the cool, hip gay shows these days rely upon on-screen texting as much as dialog (Sex Education, Uncoupled), so you should be in practice. If you’re cool, of course.

The plot for this one could have come straight from Dickens: in modern-day France, the Vuillard family are assembling at Christmas. The matriarch, Junon (played by Deneuve), has cancer and requires a bone marrow transplant; one or more of her offspring might serve as a donor. Dickens would have gone for sentiment, and we shall try really, really hard not to think about what Sally Field might have done with the role of Junon. Mercifully, these are the French, and the film is made of sterner stuff: instead of sentiment, we have a work in which two discordant realties — Christmas celebrations and clinical oncology — coexist and resonate.

As befits a large family, subplots abound.

The film’s narrator is Junon’s daughter, Elizabeth, who does not get along with her black sheep brother, Henri…in fact, the film opens with the two of them in court over a bankruptcy proceeding. Henri is dating a mysterious Jewish woman, who walks through the family’s celebration with detachment. There are grandchildren: the youngest adult son, Ivan (played by Melvil Poupaud, who provides much of the sex in the movie), has two young sons with his wife, Sylvia. In a brilliant scene, Ivan and Sylvia demonstrate how a married couple have sex while surrounded by kids and in the parental home. Elizabeth has a teenage son, Paul, who is on antipsychotics, which may or may not be working; he bonds with his black sheep uncle, Henri. And then there is Rosaimée, who we come to understand was the Villards’ grandmother’s “friend,” her lesbian lover. Grandma is long dead, but Rosaimée remains a cherished member of the family, feted with a blanket across her knees as she watches the grandchildren set off fireworks…whereupon the old bird spills one of the big family secrets.

The story, however, belongs to Junon and the film belongs to Deneuve’s performance.

Henry Adams tells us that when Rome fell, parts of France (Gaul, to the Romans) simply chose not to take notice. Three hundred years after the fall, Charlemagne was still calling the Aquitanians “the Romans,” with no hint of irony. Mme. Deneuve is not Aquitanian, she is parisienne, but she plays Junon as a Roman matron. (The character name is a give-away.) One of two great scenes in the movie involves a Christmas play written and performed by the grandchildren. Junon/Deneuve sits in the middle of the audience elegantly dressed, surrounded by her family and reigning over them…Livia or Agrippina could not look more regal. Roman, too, is the other great scene, one in which the adults in the family at a white board derive different estimates of Junon’s life expectancy, arguing whether to treat death with continuous mathematics (probability of survival has a continuous range) or discrete mathematics (any individual death is a discrete event). It’s a nod to French formal logic, of course, but in this case, the math is a stand-in for the Roman oracle, consulted to tell the future. We are told that Junon and her husband Abel lost another son in his early childhood, and perhaps because of this, Junon holds her remaining children at a certain distance. This again strikes us as Roman. At the family Christmas Eve dinner, Henri gets drunk, toasts his mother Junon as “Captain Cunt,” and his sister as her lieutenant…and then promptly passes out. Junon’s half-smiling comment is simply, “Thank goodness, he was becoming tedious.”

Deneuve’s Junon is not an ice princess, however. Alone with Abel, she reads a pamphlet describing the horrors that could await the bone marrow treatment. In a sufficiently bad reaction, she finds, one’s skin can sluff off. Beautifully underplayed, we see a controlled but completely human woman facing what could be a horrible end. And she knows it.

The supporting performances are all excellent, so it leaves a Curmudgeon with little to criticize. The Vuillards do manage to get every possible Christmas celebration — fireworks, the aforementioned dinner, midnight mass, a bar crawl, The Ten Commandments, and marital infidelity are just the headliners — into a three-day holiday. I got worn out just watching them. Our other, admittedly-small quibble is that the movie changes mode toward the end. For most of the film, the approach has been straight up realism, only slightly heightened for drama. But when Junon enters the hospital for treatment, both the cinematography and the storytelling become more impressionistic. Scenes highlighting sterile handling procedures have a surreal quality to them, as though we were moving underwater. When Junon receives the marrow transplant, we get Mme. Deneuve, not Junon: in a sterile environment, receiving radical treatment, she sports full hair and makeup, a simple but well-tailored (couture?) dress, and…panty hose. Or at least hose.

Well, it is Catherine Deneuve, after all. One does not portray the most famous face of Chanel, a French national treasure, and a one-time stamp (she was la Marianne) in a floppy hospital gown without make-up. Realism has its limits.

With all of that, the movie is anything but a downer. Call the approach Roman or call it Gallic, the film casts a stoic eye on death, keeping it at bay and allowing the warm and the humorous to carry the day. Aristotle defined comedy as the appropriate pairing of lovers, and in that sense A Christmas Tale is a medical comedy, searching for the appropriate pairing of tissue donor and tissue recipient. It even has a happy ending: Elizabeth’s voice-over closes the picture, telling us that “the transplant will take…Junon will live.”

And on that hopeful note, we end another year around here. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy and obscenely prosperous New Year to all!

The Curmudgeon

(…Time off again, Cratchit?)