Well, last night, while my counterpart was finding out whether Size Matters, I went to the movies with my mother. The selection of parent-friendly movies at the moment is quite slim, so we settled on A Christmas Tale, a French film with Catherine Deneuve and Chaira Mastroianni (daughter of Marcello and Deneuve in real life). It turned out to be the third over-two-hours movie in a row that I’ve seen about disfunctional families (the first two being Rachel Getting Married and Amarcord – a Fellini film from the 70s) in less than a month.
Not surprisingly, the movie got rave reviews from both Salon and the New York Times (and a whooping 89% on rottentomatoes.com). I think it’s mandatory for reviewers from those publications to worship any film that is a) in French, b) over two hours long, c) has Catherine Deneuve in it. But I must admit, the movie is quite powerful. It is centered around a French family, the matriarch of which (Deneuve) gets diagnosed with cancer fairly early on, and for the next 2.5 hours we watch their stories and their dynamics unravel. The most interesting point of the movie, which is eloquently summarized in Salon, is this:
…[T]he painful, wonderful, freeing truth that Desplechin gets at in “A Christmas Tale” (as he did in “Kings and Queen”) is that sometimes people feel the most lost within the context of their own families — the very context within which they should feel most at home.
It is true. We watch these people, who have known each other their whole lives and who love each other almost out of habit, realize how little they really know about one another. The house, another powerful character in the movie, connects them all with its own personality, history, complexity. And Deneuve is still, after all these years, magnificent.
