Things get all French in ‘A Christmas Tale’

I love Kenneth Turan . I love the fact that he reveres cinema, particularly French cinema. And I can never read his reviews without learning something.

But then I read this lead paragraph from his review of Arnaud Desplechin’s film “A Christmas Tale,” which is the English translation of the title “Un conte de Noﾑl” and … well, let’s start with the quote:

“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.”

Here’s the thing: I agree with the first part of that statement. Up until the film’s title, in fact. After that, however … well … Down below, I wrote about a student in a recent class that I talked to who said, about the French film “The Class,” that he wanted to climb up onto the screen and stab everyone to death.

I wonder what he would think about “A Christmas Tale”? I’m sure he would be “energized,” but not in the way that Turan means. He would likely search out an AK-47 or something. Maybe even a small nuclear weapon.

We watched the film on DVD this evening because it’s one of the films that we plan to talk about on Friday’s “Movies 101.” And while I don’t regret spending two and a half hours watching it, I can’t say that I felt that “A Christmas Tale” is “energizing, captivating” and “pure pleasure.” In fact, I feel nearly the opposite.

The set-up is simple enough: The Vuillard family is a collection of characters, each of whom is somehow affected by their mutual past history. It all began with the oldest boy who died of cancer at age 6. Now these three decades or more later the rest have gathered to celebrate Christmas.

But there are lingering resentments. Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and his sister Elisabeth (Anne Cosigny) haven’t talked in six years. And considering that he’s an unrepentant jerk and she’s a seemingly inconsolable depressive, this is hardly surprising. They, though, are hardly the most screwed up of the bunch.

Youngest brother Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) is married to a woman, Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni), who seems to have a thing for Ivan’s cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto) – who just happens to disappear once in a while so he can get drunk and “go wild.” Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s son Paull (Emile Berling) is suffering from an emotional illness that has him carrying knives and hallucinating about wolves.

And let’s not forget Junon (Catherine Deneuve), the family matriarch who has a particularly virulent kind of leukemia, which is why the patriarch, Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), has brought the family together. He wants both to support her … and to make sure that one of them will be willing to do a bone-marrow transplant.

Two of them are compatible with Junon: Henri, whose feelings for his mother are clearly muddled, and Paull, whose emotional makeup is so fragile that he needs a committee of doctors and therapists to OK the procedure. And among the other things that occur during the film, a kind of strange competition crops up between the two.

Actually, competition is the most understandable kind of emotion that the characters toss back and forth. Among a few notable others are rage, intolerance, disloyalty, insecurity and a whole lot of what shrinks like to call transference. As director Desplechin, working from the screenplay that he cowrote with Emmanuel Bourdieu, switches back and forth in time, we’re thrown into the ongoing fray that is Vuillard intimacy. And, after a while, not much of it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.

Except, of course, that it does make sense. Family stories usually do, each in their own way. The question regarding the Vuillard family is this: Does what they undergo make sense in a way that means something, anything, to us? It certainly does to Kenneth Turan.

I’m not nearly as sure. For one thing, there’s not a single sympathetic character in the bunch. Deneuve is her usual cold self, though her once-blazing beauty has been dulled a bit as she’s grown older and heavier. Amalric, so good in 2007’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” is equally good as the self-obsessed, belligerent Henri. Cosigny’s depressive loves her son, but she’s so wracked by family fighting that she’s willing to use him for her own purposes.

And so on. Add in Desplechin’s tendency to use music randomly, often throwing in a score that works almost perfectly against the presumed intended mood, and the overall sense of “A Christmas Tale” is ironic and jumbled at once.

Just what is Desplechin trying to say, especially during the scene where Ivan’s wife and the cousin begin making goo-goo eyes at easy other? Beats me. Of the characters, Turan says the following:

“These infuriating, involving individuals are so resolutely themselves, so sure they are right by their own lights, they exist in a world beyond anyone’s judgment. We hate to see their story end, not because these people are so happy, but because they are so human and so alive.”

Here’s what I say: They’re French. Draw your own conclusions.