Film

If Desplechin really is the mad scientist of contemporary French cinema, then with A Christmas Tale, he’s finally made something approximating a stable compound. (For all its brilliance, the 2000 Esther Kahn was less  a burbling in a beaker than a sustained observation of a single element—Summerium Phoenixium.) This surprisingly foursquare ensemble drama improves on Desplechin’s Kings and Queen (2004) with superior control of pacing and tone; like that film, it focuses on a family’s recriminations and flirtation with madness, which here assume the form of a classic holiday heartwarmer.

Playwright Elizabeth (Consigny) has had her brother Henri (Amalric) legally banished from her life, but a family illness occasions an unexpected reunion with parents Junon (Deneuve) and Abel (Roussillon). Note the names: Allusions to the Bible, Greek myth and Shakespeare fly by at regular intervals. Desplechin says he set out to cross The Royal Tenenbaums with Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband, and fittingly, A Christmas Tale veers from comedy to tragedy and back again. But for once, Desplechin’s hyperactive citations and alternation of visual styles serve a solid emotional center; the movie teems with the excitement of unwrapping a present, even as it deals more seriously with the intractability of blood ties. In one of the film’s comic highlights, Henri attempts to escape his family by climbing out a second-story window. In this movie, there’s no such thing as an easy exit.