Fresno Filmworks

Dark secrets are unlocked, words draw more blood than punches, and [director] Desplechin turns one family into a universe that resembles life as a startling work of art.
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

These infuriating, involving individuals are so resolutely themselves, so sure they are right by their own lights, they exist in a world beyond anyone’s judgment.
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Watching A Christmas Tale is like getting to know a family other than your own by leafing through its scrapbooks and laughing at its photograph albums, while it bickers in the next room over stuff you may never understand.
Anthony Lane, New Yorker

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Synopsis

Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) are the parents of three grown children: Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a melancholic playwright with a mathematician husband (Hippolyte Girardot) and a tortured teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling); Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the self-destructive black sheep, banished from family events by Elizabeth five years prior; youngest Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the peacemaker, is married to the beautiful Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni) and has two eccentric little boys; while a fourth – Joseph, the eldest – died from leukemia as a boy. When the disease reappears again in the family, all are tested to see who can be a donor, and then everyone – including lovesick cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto) and Henri’s girlfriend, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos) – return home for a long Christmas weekend. All crowded again under the same roof, solidarity quickly – and hilariously – devolves into feuding, drunkenness and bed-hopping, as everyone struggles to make sense of the mysteries of family, life, and what lies ahead.

Directed by Arnaud Desplechin
France, 2008
In French with English subtitles
152 minutes, NR