After The Unborn, I drove a half mile north across the New Hampshire line, where I spent a couple hours at the Barnes and Noble taking notes from a book about the JFK assassination. As I did so, I realized that it was the very last evening of the Bush presidency.
Afterward I drove westward through the dark to Wilton, back to the Town Cinema there that I've come to enjoy so much. This time I didn't have time to eat at the Greek diner on Main Street, but unlike last time, the cinema had popcorn, which was nice and cheap, albeit a little over-buttered.
It was my second visit to Wilton in a week to see a French movie. There were only five other people in the audience---all older women---to see the Monday evening showing of Un conte de Noel.
The movie is about a dysfunctional family in Roubaix in northern France. The mother (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with a fatal cancer for which she needs a bone marrow transplant. She shows no symptoms yet and seems not to care about her fate. We learn that her odds of surviving Graft-Versus-Host disease are less than 50-50.
Will she find a compatible and willing donor from among her family? Can her children get along with each other in a civil manner, as they gather for Christmas at the family house? Will the estranged siblings even talk to each other?
I had known nothing about the film before I got to Wilton, so I had expected it to be about, well, Christmas. But it reminded me more of a darker version of The Royal Tennenbaums, a comment I saw echoed on a blog after I saw the movie.
The movie has a scatter-shot method of storytelling that is at times confusing. There is lots of dialogue, and thus many subtitles, and at 2 hours and 37 minutes, it fully taxed my concentration to follow it all, especially as the second movie of the day.
This is not the heartwarming Christmas movie you might be expecting. If anything, it's an anti-Christmas movie. In fact, the dominant theme is one of inversion, reflected by the repetition of references to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the movie, the musical composition, and the play).
We have a mother who literally feels no love for her son, yet he must give his bone marrow to save her. Love is thwarted at every turn. Jesus, the little children are told, never existed. The Christianity of the movie is vacant and dead.
By the end of the movie, I couldn't help thinking that this was essentially the same movie as Nothing Like the Holidays, which is also about a dysfunctional family celebrating (anti-)Christmas in vacant fashion. One of the parallels is the presence of a Jewish girlfriend of one of the family sons. The contrast between her vibrant Judaism and the family's empty Christianity is highlighted. Rather than spend any more time there, she leaves on Christmas eve to go spend a "non-holiday" with her own family.
It was also the third movie in a year (along with No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight) to employ a coin-flip as a metaphor for the randomness of fate, and of life and death.
By the end, it had just wore me out, and yet I was not happy when it was over, since it left so many of the emotional threads of the movie unresolved.
Fortunately the Wilton Town Cinema had posted the synopsis of the movie on a bulletin board outside in the lobby. I usually don't read those, but in this case I was dazed and just plain needed a little more context to wrap things up. I suppose it's a weakness. All these Hollywood movies have enfeebled me.
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