Desplechin’s prime embodiment of disorder is once again Mathieu Amalric, who has appeared in three of this director’s previous films (and who is also the latest James Bond villain). He plays Henri, the black sheep of the Vuillard clan and Elizabeth’s mortal enemy. Alcoholic and impetuous, Henri, who arrives unexpectedly with his new lover, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), jolts the rest of the family into spasms of pity, resentment and half-admiring amazement at his sheer nerve.
Desplechin has a positive genius for making his carefully structured tales seem breathless and aleatory. The result, in the case of A Christmas Tale, is a movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty — marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche — and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.
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