Word: tales
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...been four decades since Luis Buñuel tied Catherine Deneuve to a tree, ripped her blouse and threatened her with a flogging in Belle de Jour. The actress is now 65 years old, still beautiful, a little less icy, and if we are to judge from A Christmas Tale, more interested in fine dining than in exotic sexuality...
...Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin's richly populated film about a fractious family gathering for the holidays in a provincial city. Deneuve is the curiously calm matriarch and least neurotic member of this brood. She needs a bone-marrow transplant if she is to survive the sudden onset of leukemia, which is something of a family curse. The best donor possibility is, naturally, one of her kin. The trouble is that they are apparently more interested in their own petty feuds than they are in rescuing her. That's especially true of Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a glum playwright who, several years...
...film is full of slightly weird children, plus a certain amount of sexual tension - you may be an in-law, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're sexually uninteresting to someone else in the crowded family manse - but none of this turns A Christmas Tale into a farce. Desplechin is aware of the humorous cross-currents in the film, but he's not out to exploit them. He's a more serious filmmaker than that, interested in exploring the wayward, occasionally inexplicable tensions of a group bound together more by the accidents of birth than by any true communality...
...remember the title: A Christmas Tale. During the holidays, we are supposed to make our best reconciliatory efforts with our relatives and render our deepest distrusts and dislikes mute for a couple of days. Accordingly, this film is a triumph of willed optimism (or perhaps more accurately, of grudging good nature) over unhappy experiences, though it does not make any large promises about the future of this family. It suffices that somehow all of its characters survive their forced intimacy intact, if not necessarily wiser for the experience. It seemed to me as I left the theater that A Christmas...
...telling its uplifting tale, Billy Elliot does an amazing job of not pandering. Billy's road to self-discovery is hard fought, and it comes at a painful price. His father, once over the shock and the shame of learning his boy's ambitions, crosses the picket line to earn money for Billy's audition. Issues of sexuality and gender-stereotyping are faced head-on but not pressed. He's no "poof," Billy insists, but that doesn't stop him from a joyful number in which he dons women's dresses with his (less poof-averse) friend Michael...