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 supposedly 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 exhausting and over-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 or 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 simplified the complexities of Nietzsche to allow himself to sidestep 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. 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. 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.