Un Conte de Noël
Arnaud Desplechin, 2008
The century’s only Christmas film of significance to date is this one from a perceptive observer of French haute-bourgeois life and intellectual self-deception. It’s a rambling domestic epic about three generations of a dysfunctional family drawn together to celebrate Christmas and decide whose bone-marrow is compatible with that of cancer-stricken matriarch Catherine Deneuve. It’s a superbly acted up-market equivalent of one of those downbeat yuletide editions of EastEnders, except here the characters refer to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bergman
The Guardian
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