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December 21, 2008
Un conte de Noël
Last night the wife and I went to see Un conte de Noël , Arnaud Desplechin's tale of a Christmas gathering of the large and fractious fictional Vuillard clan. Certainly we approached it with a kind of anticipation that was only natural for a film that has earned such critical praise (as of this writing, it had garnered an extremely respectable 92 percent from the "Top Critics" at Rotten Tomatoes). I am thus quite surprised that I cannot offer it more than a lukewarm thumbs up.
Maybe Un conte de Noël is just a victim of a kind of dashed irrational expectations on my part. Certainly I should have read less into the critical praise than I did. These guys are all slaves to a certain type of French cinema (a subservience that I suspect dates back to an early inability to separate any kind of wheat from chaff during the New Wave).
At the core of my disappointment with this film is an ultimate weariness with all that it tries to do. Desplechin makes too many homages to other directors (see Roger Ebert's review for a positive send up of this angle, but I am afraid that Mr. Ebert and I fundamentally disagree about whether this is the stuff of good film making per se). There are literally too many scenes, and many linger too long (but not to Bergman-esque affect), in a film that is well over two hours.
Above all, there are too many incredible fault lines in this family: in the end there is a kind of cumulative emotional implausibility to the Vuillard clan. How many times can you explain away extraordinarily odd emotional gestures and responses by suggesting with a shrug that "well, they're French..."? Somewhere between the comic violence of the matriarch's indifference to her son Henri and a husband's weird indifference to his wife's infidelity, the film crossed the line separating the extraordinary from the unbelievable. (Of course, it could be that the Vuillards are simply an extraordinarily cohesive club of navel gazers, but then the film would be still be problematic but for different reasons.) I still recommend it on balance, but it is not the engaging experience some have suggested: for that it would have to be considerably streamlined and, frankly, emotionally truer.
Posted by dag at December 21, 2008 10:20 AM