Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

A Christmas Tale
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin
A-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Nov. 21

Kings & Queens, mad Frenchman Arnaud Desplechin's last picture, was a five-hour film compressed into two and a half hours. By contrast, his latest, A Christmas Tale, feels like a four-hour film crammed into 150 minutes. Is that really a bad thing? For some fans, perhaps, but there's no shame in a tighter focus--and Desplechin is still second only to Guy Maddin as the most delightfully scatterbrained current filmmaker.

So flighty is his attention span that Desplechin feels compelled to tie A Christmas Tale to one of the more dreaded film premises: the wildly dysfunctional family begrudgingly reuniting for a major holiday. Desplechin even goes so far as to make the matriarch (Catherine Deneuve) sick with the same cancer that claimed her first son four decades earlier.

Somewhat reluctantly, she and tubby, perpetually giddy husband Jean-Paul Roussillon open their scenic Roubaix home to their three children and assorted guests. Icy, fragile playwright Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) shows up with mentally ill teen son (Emile Berling), even though that means sharing the same space with Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the crazed black sheep of the family (and current slimy Bond villain) whom she "banished" from her life five years prior.

Meanwhile, youngest child Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) lugs along his cute kids and wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's real-life daughter), who discovers their withdrawn painter cousin (Laurent Capelluto) may still harbor a decade-long crush.

Happily, any similarities to The Family Stone and its ilk end pretty much immediately. There will be no teary reunions, no longtime grudges overcome, no jarring segues from wackiness to a goopy climax. A Christmas Tale skips almost all of the expected emotional beats.

We never find out what definitively caused the riff between Consigny and Amalric (hilariously volatile as ever), and the only truly earth-quaking development opens a whole new set of problems. Desplechin's shtick is a brutal but bemused honesty that's often darkly funny, as when Deneuve and Amalric giggle as they reiterate their mutual dislike.

Like Rachel Getting Married, A Christmas Tale is an Altmanesque party, only Desplechin is a lot less self-satisfied and infinitely more restless. He changes styles constantly, employing direct address, cartoon cutouts, Truffautian irises and obtuse homages to theater (A Midsummer Night's Dream), literature (Georges Bataille) and film (Vertigo), all while juggling the extensive baggage of a sprawling cast of egocentrics. Not since, well, Kings & Queen has calling something overstuffed been such a compliment.

Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle
C+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Wed., Nov. 26

The songs of M.I.A. pepper the soundtrack of international extravaganza Slumdog Millionaire. This isn't just to be hip. (Though it's that too.) Like the Sri Lankan songstress, the film is very much part of the 21st century move toward a global melting pot--a polyglot fantasia in which each culture bounces off the other in fascinating and delectable ways.

And so while Slumdog Millionaire is set in India, with an Indian cast and mostly Indian filmmaking styles, it's helmed by a British director (Danny Boyle), makes prominent use of a British TV show and features a message of rapid social ascension and stupid-in-the-head love that's purely universal.

But for its first half, Slumdog is simply content to be eye-poppingly, energetic. As the film opens, teenage nobody Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is a mere few questions away from beating the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

As Malik sweats out the questions, Boyle intercuts footage of him being tortured and beaten.

Huh?

Turns out Malik's been accused of cheating, and as the shadowy, belligerent authorities go through his taped performance, answer by answer, we're treated to his ramshackle, Dickensian childhood as an orphaned slum kid from Mumbai, riding the rails and eking out various desperate existences alongside his more crafty and ethics-handicapped brother.

The alchemic mix of cheap game-show tension, grimy social realism and keyed-up filmmaking is strange and irresistible; think City of God, only not annoyingly Scorsese-esque and more life-affirming (except, that is, when kids are getting their eyes scooped out by ne'er-do-wells).