Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

One of the pure joys of the Chicago Film Festival this year was A CHRISTMAS TALE, the latest work by French writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (KINGS & QUEEN, ESTHER KAHN, MY SEX LIFE...), a film less about the holidays and more about how even the most demented, dysfunctional, back-stabbing family members can pull together in times of crisis... if only they then can get just a little more screwed up than they were before.

For those of you as obsessed and enamored with current French cinema, this one is kind of this year's crown jewel with its unbelievably notable and stellar cast, including the Catherine Deneuve as the family's matriarch Junon, and QUANTUM OF SOLACE villain Mathieu Amalric as the eldest living brother Henri, the most self-destructive (or perhaps just plain destructive) member of the family, whose manipulations and bad behavior got to be so unbearable that his own sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) had him banished from the family five years earlier as part of a court settlement. The younger brother, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) is the most stable creature in this barn, and seems to have escaped the household relatively unscathed, now with a wife (Chiara Mastroianni) and two wise-beyond-their-years sons. Rounding out the clan is father Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), a man of logic and reason (some might say blissful ignorance as well), but also someone filled with great passion for his wife and great affection for his children.

While there certainly is a thread of a plot to A CHRISTMAS TALE involving Junon being diagnosed with leukemia (a disease her eldest son, Joseph, died from as a child), and each member of the family getting tested to see if there is a bone marrow transplant possibility, the real joy of watching the film is to lay witness to the dance that goes on as the siblings each arrive home for Christmas, including the exiled Henri. The film examines each character as they relate to each other and how they relate to their own families. Elizabeth has an emotionally troubled son (Emile Berling), and a soulless husband. Ivan would appear to have the perfect family until cousin Simon arrives and a long-buried secret about him and Ivan's wife is revealed. Henri brings his new girlfriend Faunia (the charming Emmanuelle Devos, who has starred in many of Desplechin's films, as have Deneuve and Amalric), who becomes deeply engrained in the family in just a few short days.

While A CHRISTMAS TALE has great moments of humor, it's some of the darkest you're likely to see this year. Even when potential donors come to light, the emotional blackmail games begin with a vengeance. Henri does not easily forget who supported his banishment and who defended him. If you've never seen Amalric in a non-English language film, this is a great introduction to his talents. He was absolutely devastating in last year's The DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY as the stroke victim narrator, but this work really shows just how unhinged he can become with the right material. We watch him bob and weave from charmer to bastard, sometimes within the same scene.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the film is that it doesn't use Christmas as an emotional crutch, a cure all to all family problems. If anything, the holiday season highlights what is so deeply wrong with this family by pulling everyone together under the same roof to pick at each other, dig at old wounds, and unbury painful memories. A CHRISTMAS TALE is the anti-holiday movie, and I love it all the more for being so. One of the reasons I am so passionate about French cinema is that there seems to be a genuine community among dramatic actors. In America, we see a lot of this communal work in comedies, but in France we see so many of the same actors working together time after time. Deneuve and Amalric have made so many movies together, I've lost count, as have Amalric and Devos and Deneuve and Mastroianni (which isn't surprising since they are mother and daughter). There are many other examples of this co-mingling in French cinema, and in a way it's a comforting phenomenon and an easy way to keep track of certain favorite actors.

A CHRISTMAS TALE is loading with screaming matches, drunken declaration, a bit of bed-hopping, and some hard-won revelations and realizations about this family that are equal parts brutal and liberating. Go see this film and then go home and hug someone in your family, and thank your stars that your relationships are (hopefully) just a little bit more stable than the ones in this wholly satisfying and riveting work. And by all means, get to this one before the next onslaught of Hollywood Christmas movies hits theaters to water down and artificially sweeten the holiday season.

-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com