Mathieu Amalric gets tipsy in Un Conte De Noel

Tis the season for lots of things, but let’s not forget rancour, resentment and rage. While it’s true that these special friends don’t often get invited to the Christmas gatherings we see onscreen, they certainly enliven the one in Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale), Arnaud Desplechin’s new contribution to the canon of films about family members heading home for the holidays and not necessarily liking what (and who) they find there.

“They’re so full of rage, each one of them,” says Desplechin of his fictional clan in an interview at TIFF in September. “They are pissed, and they don’t exactly know why. They act like brutes. But the film can’t be as brutal as they are.”

Thankfully, it isn’t. Like many of the French director’s past features — including his masterly 2004 drama Rois et reine — it’s a volatile tempest of insights, allusions, events and emotions that never settles on one mood or mode for long. The overall effect for the viewer is invigorating, as if what we’re watching is not a fractious group of squabbling relatives but, in Desplechin’s words, “a theatre troupe.”

It helps that this troupe is comprised of many of France’s best actors. Current Bond baddie Mathieu Amalric plays Henri, the acid-tongued black sheep who rejoins the fold years after being exiled by his frosty older sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny). While some of the Vuillard clan is happy to have him back at the family home in Roubaix, matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) is not one of them. Indeed, Un conte de Noel derives much of its energy from this fraught dynamic between mother and son, one that is haunted by the childhood death of Henri’s older brother and complicated by the fact that Junon needs some of Henri’s bone marrow if she hopes to survive her bout with cancer.

The affable, soft-spoken Desplechin explains how his screenplays — which he co-writes with Emmanuel Bourdieu, the director of features Poison Friends and Intrusions — often take shape around a line of dialogue that he himself finds shocking. In the case of Un conte de Noël, it was this morsel by Henri: “I don’t like my mother, I never liked her — actually, she’s not my mother.”

“How can you say that?” Desplechin wonders aloud with a laugh. “And who can allow themselves to say such a line? It’s so violent and intense. And because it’s forbidden, it’s a good line for an actor. So now the question becomes how to create a plot and a situation for this to be said with some truth behind it.”

In effect, Desplechin writes the rest of the script to learn “how such a line became possible.” And being in the first rank of French filmmakers, he has the clout to get the actors who can make it sing. His ongoing collaboration with Amalric — one of Desplechin’s own informal family of actors, a group that also includes Emmanuelle Devos, seen here as Henri’s girlfriend — takes another surprising turn with the actor’s performance as Henri, a far less likeable sort than Ismaël, his character in Rois et reine.

Desplechin says Amalric “brings a quality of colour of despair” to his roles. “Ismaël was so loving and funny but Henri is not funny — he’s really dark. And when he’s mean, he’s just mean, period! But how can you do that without making a caricature? Mathieu has to find something else, another way to connect with the audience. He creates this dark character but in a nice way, a clever way, a sharp way. I think he succeeds so well.”

The filmmaker adds that, even though he and Bourdieu knew their characters could be quite monstrous, they had to find ways of loving them anyway. Moreover, as he notes, “There is nothing low in their meanness. They are quite noble in a way — they don’t complain. The children are just like their father and mother: they do not complain. The mother is dying but she is not complaining. The father has lost a child but he is not complaining. They are not low. That’s why this brash attitude they have is fun.”

Desplechin’s movie shares their brashness in his approach to elements familiar from countless family melodramas. An avid student of cinema, the director looked to many movies for inspiration, including Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (“because of the plot and the pace”) and John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead. Two more-recent releases struck him as particularly pertinent to his ambitions here: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband.

“I was amazed by the fact that these two films had the same structure,” he says. “Each has one house that’s like a castle — one is lost in the city, one is lost in the woods. And each has a terrible father, a father who’s really mean and dysfunctional. Each has incestuous love between a sister and a brother. And there’s a suicide scene, even the same kind of suicide with someone slashing his wrists. I had both these films in mind. They have the same kind of intensity, and I wanted my film to have that intensity, too.”

He certainly achieves it with this boisterous, maddening and moving look at family life. Even so, the Vuillards may want to take it easier on each other if they get together for Easter.