Christmas Miracle

An interview with Amaud Desplechin

by Sam Adams

Catherine Deneuve in Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION

Arnaud Desplechin's characters are so big that his movies can barely contain them, but for him, they are no larger than life. A Christmas Tale is filled with enough buried secrets and family feuding to power a Greek tragedy, but the story is set against the decidedly unglamorous backdrop of Roubaix, a city Desplechin says is "famous for not being famous at all."

The film has origins in the American Thanksgiving movie, which brings relatives together for a few days of recrimination and reconciliation. Concentrating on that "humble" genre was more comforting than pretending to make a successor to other "absolute masterpieces which I'm too much impressed with."

In Desplechin's version, estranged siblings Mathieu Amalric and Anne Consigny, are forcibly reunited by mother Catherine Deneuve's need for a bone marrow transplant. The family's history is as likely to come to light through shouting as a shadow-puppets, or a letter in which Amalric chides his sister, "You have offended against the blood."

The reference to blood — as tradition, as honor, as the bearer of sickness — amounts to a bold statement of the movie's themes. It's as if Amalric's character knows he is part of a drama. In most movies, Desplechin says, "the characters are supposed to ignore the fact that they are characters. But I like that the character is allowed to be cleverer than me."

As Desplechin describes it, he envisions scenes before he has the characters to populate them; he knows the lines, but not who is saying them, or why. "Let's say that the father would say the lines, 'Grief has nothing to teach me. My son fell from me like a leaf from a tree.' These are very odd lines, very shocking. I don't understand them. But I think it would be nice to see a father in a graveyard saying those lines. What does it mean? Why did he do that? I don't know. I just know the scene works."

The vicious relationships between blood relatives in Desplechin's movies is hardly holiday fare, but the director sees that less as a judgment than a statement of fact. A journalist asked him, "Are you pro- or against family?" "I was not able to answer such a question," Desplechin says. "Families just are."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

See Shaun Brady's review of A Christmas Tale.