A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale” (Un conte de Noel) is a three ring circus, triple-strand story woven around the holiday reunion of a bourgeois family in a smallish town in northern France. No Twilight of the Gods, even in all lower-case, it is more Danse Macabre, as the Vuillard clan acts out their long-ago agreed roles with the predictable familiarity of a Commedia dell’Arte troupe.

Junon, the beautiful and aging matriarch, has been recently diagnosed with a degenerative disease. A transplant may save her life or at least give her more time, but practically no one is compatible with her rare blood type. This plight mimics the family’s chosen myth that revolves around the death at six of the firstborn child, Joseph.

At that time, neither parent, nor Joseph’s younger sister Elizabeth, was compatible for the possible transplant that might have saved the boy’s life, so Abel and Junon conceived a third child, Henri, in the hope that he would be able to save Joseph’s life by providing the necessary genetic material for the desperate medical procedure. An early placental biopsy confirmed that Henri would be useless in the effort to save Joseph, a sorrowful fact for which the not yet born child would never be forgiven by his mother.

Joseph dies and Elizabeth becomes the elder sibling. Her gaze inalterably fixated on her dead brother and the past, she barely tolerates Henri and eventually will blame him for everything wrong in her life. A last, late child, Ivan, is born into this brood. Innocent of the tragedy that has shaped the reality of the rest of his family, he is not so much free of their drama as untethered in general, a lightweight outsider of a different sort, about whom no one need bother too much.

Decades pass, each family member plays her/his part. Everyone has done their homework: an elaborate ornamental framework references the Bible, of course, but also Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Proust, Emerson, Wagner, Charlie Byrd, Charlton Heston, Ingmar Bergman and Greek and Roman mythology-- much of the structure of the three siblings relationships and identities is perhaps too neatly contained in the story of Juno, queen of the gods of Olympus, and her three children: Juventas, Mars and Vulcan.

The film culminates in the family’s unhappy Yuletide reunion, brought about and followed by Junon’s fateful operation which is not a success. Her body develops a violent rash in the process of rejecting Henri’s bone marrow-- a fitting end; she may die in a blaze of illumination like Medea’s princess victim, once again able to blame Henri for failure; the family myth comes full cycle. Ever practical, Junon has dressed in black for the transfusion, not to be caught unprepared.

Another story exists within the images of the film that describes how each character turns away from the face of life and the experience of the moment. What they seek to avoid is the humiliation—in this sense the “humanizing” element—of flawed, humble, unattractive, and precarious human existence. Siblings, father and mother all have their moments of acting out bad behavior, as if proof against the visible testimony that each has long ago given up on life itself and now only marks time and place in repetitive acts and minor divertissements that are comfortable from familiarity and the absence of challenge.

Elizabeth is a picture of obstinate juvenile spite and pride. Her father would have her believe that her constant sorrow is for the lost brother she cannot recall. She wants to believe that Henri is to blame for everything. Henri complies by endlessly providing the discordant note upon which all the others depend for focusing their contempt. Henri and Elizabeth are two sides of the same coin, locked in battle: she, underhanded and mopey, he, over-the-top and blustering.

Elizabeth’s true error is in being false to herself and one scene tells us that she knows herself more than she likes, not that it has had, will have, or, perhaps, can have any effect. Happily ensconced in misery, sorrow and spiteful retribution, her normal stance is momentarily interrupted when a gift arrives from Spatafora- a minor character and childhood friend and her siblings’ local drug dealer. She takes the pure and plain gold heart out of its box and dangles it gently as she smiles and is transported briefly out of her self-absorption.

Henri is forever blamed for the death of the brother he never knew. Junon claims to dislike Henri and the feelings are mutual, but nothing so severe that anyone need really be troubled by it. Henri is a pint-sized changeling of aggression, constant agitation and physical immediacy, unable to resist the temptation to fight and brawl.

His real crime is to be gauche, and invincible; he never wins, but he never gives up. His is the awkward irrepressibility of life, but put to no use. Henri can barely remember his wife who died early in their marriage in a car accident, her way, perhaps, of getting at least a tiny bit of his attention all to herself, and then freedom from the endless thorny enclosure of his self-regard.

Abel has conveniently--perhaps necessarily-- simplified the complexities of Nietzsche to enable himself to transform the mortal anguish of the loss of his son Joseph, turning it instead into the radiant glow of heavenly enlightenment: the little grave becomes an immense foundation of spiritual joy. He would have everyone believe, as he tells Elizabeth, that, simply, “one cannot know oneself,” and must therefore await the fullness of time for the mysteries to be revealed. This attitude allows him ample free time for music and quiet chores.

Junon decides to go ahead with the transplant, reversing her previous statement against the operation. Abel is seated in his study listening to a jazz recording and following along with the score in hand. Junon must bang on the door to get his attention. He turns down the volume and awaits her latest announcement. Ostensibly pleased with her choice, he asks if she wants him to inform Henri, the compatible donor for the operation. Yes. She hesitates a moment at the door and then leaves, as Abel, seated still, turns back to readjust up the volume on the stereo. Outside she slumps momentarily on the stairs, knowing something is amiss, but then catches her breath and moves on.

Every opportunity that life awards for an encounter with authenticity into the unexpected is finessed into a known form and thus sophisticated, neutered into convention, a minor-key cause célèbre of amusement or irritation. The Midnight Mass is little more than a quaint neighborhood fair or charity bake sale entertainment, pleasant overall. Ivan tells his two young sons that Jesus never existed, and certainly won’t appear after midnight in the grandchildren’s little toy crèche-- nothing “new” is coming into the world that night or any night chez Vuillard.

Every gesture and action is the enemy of lived life, of possibility; nothing leads anywhere too complicated or too unknown. At the film’s end Henri is alone with his mother in the cold, bright hospital room, a sterile plastic sheet divides them. He proffers up a gold coin to Junon—a chance for a toss of luck or payment to Charon? Either way, Henri shakes his head: you don’t want to know.

In another telling-- the third ring of this circus cycle, the real tension of the film is not within the family’s predictable antics, but whether any of it matters at all in light of the coming storm: the massive monoliths of anonymous housing projects and office buildings that encroach further and further into the Vuillard’s world. Far more dangerous than the degenerative disease that will kill Junon or the cancer that took little Joseph is this overwhelming, silent tide. It will not be satisfied with mere individuals, but hungers to consume an entire way of life.

In fact, life at the Vuillard’s is already a dream past its prime, past life itself; it is a testament to the old. The stylish and capacious family manse can no longer contain itself let alone all its members and the light of day reveals what the fireworks of Christmas Eve did not: that the house is a wounded and crumbling ghost, part of a faultline of forgotten old structures, surrounded, descending into an ever darker oblivion as the new and huge blocky towers of granite, glass and steel press in from all sides.

I've Loved You So Long

It would be an act of critical generosity to describe this film as flawed. More accurately, “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a work in which the writer/director, Philippe Claudel, has avoided the tasks he set himself, choosing instead to engage the viewer at the lowest level of sentimentality, counting on the audience’s love affair with Kristin Scott Thomas to breathe oxygen into an airless piece. A slow and intentionally misleading storyline asks the viewer first to try to understand Scott Thomas’ character, Juliette, and then slaps the audience with a volte face that nonetheless could have been compelling if Claudel had used it as something more than a tear-jerker ending.

From the film’s opening image of Juliette—just out of prison after 15 years—waiting at the airport to be picked up by her sister, Lea, it is evident that a secret will ultimately be revealed. If this woman served a long jail sentence, it was obviously her choice. Why and for what would she have been wrongly condemned? Near the story’s end, a circumstantial occurrence reveals that Juliette’s murder of her terminally ill young son was a mercy killing done by her as a doctor to spare the boy the anguished final days of dying. Conveniently, the trial brought none of this to light—no autopsy, no mitigating circumstances, so that Juliette’s right to her martyrdom remained absolute and unchallenged, allowing her to return to society carrying the ultimate stigma of filicide.

This might have been a movie about a woman having found through the darkest secret her only way to cope with her child’s death. The work would then have had its life in the tension between an unrevealed truth and an unbearable agony. Her interactions with the world she has rejoined would offer her the redemptive opportunity to let go of the specialness of secrecy and face openly that even the greatest loss does not equal the end of life.

The time in prison which she engineered, however improbable as credible plot, would then have been a confinement for her unwarranted hubris in allowing a false narrative to dictate a conclusion. When and how would she see her untold tale as a running away from the challenges of life? That sequence might have been compelling.

Unfortunately, the film ignores the impossibility that no one else noticed the child’s disease and disfiguration. As a doctor Juliette processed her son’s blood tests herself and did not feel the need to verify the results or seek other opinions about treatment, nor did she feel the need or obligation to confide in her ex-husband, the boy’s father. No one was to have a hand in this but she.

A very different character could have emerged of a selfish woman struggling with her own inability to allow her child a separate existence, unwilling to grant him his place in the complexity of a mysterious larger world. In her act of mercy, Juliette retains the starring role. There are many ways besides the literal act of murder in which narcissistic and unfulfilled parents can burden, thwart and cripple their children as if they were merely props in a claustrophobic play and not beings with lives of their own.

The parole officer to whom Juliette must report weekly wants only to tell her about his own life and his yearning to go to the Orinoco river, a kind of image for him of journeying to the source, into expansiveness, away from the prosaic routine and disappointment about things not having worked out on a personal level—his divorce and separation from his young daughter. The ’trip to the Orinoco’ ends in his suicide by gunshot; he can find no actual way to enlarge his existence, to incorporate the painful facts of his life into the continuing journey. His is the active version of the symbolic passive suicide which has been Juliette’s fate in failing to confront her unfinished life.

For Juliette, the director conflates discovery with self-discovery; the vignettes of the film seem calculated only for their emotional effect on the audience, not as testament to the complexity of evolving from or evoking depth experience in response to the difficult and tragic realities of life. Since complexity has been absent from her return to society, Juliette’s voyage has had no thrust and the viewer feels tricked and patronized. If it is really only that she needed to tell someone else—or have someone else “know”, what is the point of all she has done and been through? How, after all this, can that make any difference to her? We are left knowing Juliette as little at the end as at the beginning, but with good reason not to trust her or the director.