A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (2008) competed for the Palme d'Or, and it is the best thing he has made: a sprawling, literary family drama with the spirit of a nineteenth-century novel and the chaos of a real holiday gathering. It settled Desplechin's reputation as one of the most ambitious film-makers of his generation.

Catherine Deneuve plays the ailing matriarch presiding over a houseful of grudges, with Mathieu Amalric as the dissolute, exiled son whose return reignites old conflicts, and a deep ensemble around them. Desplechin directs with restless invention, using direct address and iris shots and swinging from farce to grief within a scene, and he has no interest in the tidy catharsis the premise seems to promise. Illness simply gives this family the occasion to be fully, messily itself, cruel and tender by turns.

Critics took to its richness and its performances, and it appeared on numerous best-of-year lists. It is generous and digressive, and A Christmas Tale treats family as an unsolvable problem, something nobody is going to mend, which makes it all the more moving. It is a high point of contemporary French cinema and of the long collaboration between Deneuve, Amalric and Desplechin, with Deneuve and Amalric leading an ensemble of rare depth. Few modern French family dramas are as emotionally complex, or as comfortable with contradiction.