I think French film entices me because I know so little about French language and culture; it suggests an as-yet-unexplored world of magical, incomprehensible people.
A year and a bit ago, I saw a trailer for Un conte de Noël, a French movie that I immediately knew I’d want — need —to see. If it had been an American movie, the title alone (A Christmas Tale) would have been enough to repulse me, suggesting — as it does, at least to this American — yuletide cheer, warmly-lit soft-focus shots of children, and cloying morals. But the trailer proved irresistible. It promised that this film would have everything I’ve always dreamed the French have — wry humor, dark wisdom, lissome women, cigarettes. Plus it starred Catherine Deneuve, which was key. Turns out the movie wasn’t too popular; I remember it running for only about a week in San Francisco, disappearing before I’d had a chance to see it.
When I watched the aforementioned trailer, I was a student, living in the Bay Area, possessed of the conviction that wanting to be a professional, snappy, hard-drinking newspaperwoman of merciless wit (yes, like Dorothy Parker!) was a practical ambition that might very well blossom into reality. Ever since I was a young soul in a pinstripe uniform skirt at Catholic school, I’ve been an ace dreamer and aspirer. Novels and films were, of course, always helpful in this pursuit, supplying fodder for my half-baked imaginings of an adult life in which I was completely and blissfully unlike myself — hard-hitting, high-cheekboned, possibly wearing a silk headscarf and dark glasses, et cetera, et cetera.
Escapism beyond escapism came in the form of French films, which I think have always been particularly alluring to me because I don’t actually speak French, apart from the bare-bones faux-vocab I picked up from Monty Python. (Fetchez la vache!) I suppose it’s because I know so little about French language and culture that French film entices me, suggesting an as-yet-unexplored world of magical, incomprehensible people. When I visit my hair stylist — also a Ruth, though she goes by ‘Rue’ — I always bring along the same photo of Jean Seberg in Breathless for Rue to use as a template. I inevitably end up looking more like a baby bird than a lithe Herald Tribune hawker, but a girl can dream.
Admiring Catherine Deneuve also began as an aspirational, dreamy thing. For the benefit of those not similarly obsessed: Catherine Deneuve is an iconic French actress in her late 60s who used to be a blonde French beach babe (if the French have such a thing as beach babes). Anyway, she was a jolie femme, or a jeune fille jolie, or whatever. Now she’s an elegant older lady, sort of like France’s Meryl Streep, still blonde and still jolie, though I wonder whether she’s had work done, because something in her cheekbone area looks altered. But no matter. I love Deneuve. She has this masterful way of drawing back her head and lifting her chin slightly and looking imperiously down at someone or something, all in one effortless, near-imperceptible movement. I try that move out sometimes, to absolutely no avail.
Because a professor of mine liked Deneuve, and because this professor was tasteful, and because I wanted to be tasteful like this professor, I liked Deneuve, naturellement. I remember once sitting in the professor’s office, quite literally on the edge of my seat, afraid as always that I was saying the wrong thing about the wrong thing, worrying that I’d accidentally drawn on my face (as is my unfortunate habit) while resting my chin on my right hand, in which I was clutching an uncapped felt-tip pen. The conversation turned to movies — or rather films, as one was careful to say — and I was taking notes, which is a useful thing to do around this professor, since she drops essential-sounding book titles like she’s Hansel and Gretel and the lesser-known Modernist novels are their crumbled sourdough. Every few minutes, she’d throw in a French phrase, and I’d write it down the best I could and look it up later. She mentioned a film, 8 Femmes, and I made a note.
8 Femmes, now a favorite, was my first Deneuve film, a strange and campy and — to me — supremely delightful murder-mystery-comedy-musical, also starring the incomparable Fanny Ardant. It might even be said that Ardant is even more of a fox than Deneuve. (In Wayne’s World, she’d be called a renarde.) Ardant and Deneuve have a fleeting Sapphic moment in 8 Femmes — a fantastic renarde-on-renarde encounter — which is just incroyable! My roommate was particularly taken by this little number, learned the song by heart, and led me in a shot-for-shot re-enactment of the dance sequence (featuring me as the nonspeaking kiddo in green clamdiggers). After 8 Femmes, I became forever a faithful Deneuve-ite. So Un conte de Noël, in which Deneuve plays an ailing matriarch, was of course a must-see.
A few weeks ago, Un conte de Noël finally arrived in my parents’ mailbox in a Netflix envelope. It arrived in my parents’ mailbox because I’m unemployed and living at home. I’m lucky, it’s true, to have a place to live rent-free, among family, but it’s certainly a few steps down from my lofty, Dorothy Parker-y dreams and aspirations. If my Younger Self could meet my Present Self, she’d slap me. And vice versa. How could she be so naïve? And how could I be so lazy? And now, overwhelmingly enough, it’s Christmas, the holiday of great disillusionment, and I’m not feeling particularly hopeful or Christ-like. The whole God thing is finis for me, and has been ever since Richard Dawkins whispered his sweet humanist nothings in my ears. Which makes Christmas a reminder of the biggest letdown of all letdowns—not only do I not have a job, but there is no Christ child, despite what the nuns said at Catholic school. Yesterday, my father strode into the kitchen holding a baby Jesus figurine (purloined from our crèche) and, while making zoom noises, flew the ceramic baby around my mother’s head.
So in time for Christmas this year, I finally saw the film, which the trailer had advertised, more or less, as a wacky French comedy, with some tristesse thrown in. Uplifting, I hoped. Like Amélie, maybe? A brief respite from my histrionic angst? Not so. The brainchild of writer/director Arnaud Desplechin, the film is ambitiously deep, dark, lyrical, long. Junon Vuillard (Deneuve) has just been diagnosed with leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant, so her children and grandchildren undergo tests to see if they’re potential donors. Junon’s older husband, Abel (Jean-Paul Rousillon) discusses the details of his wife’s illness with a frankness that borders on ruthlessness, but Junon remains calm. As Christmas nears, Junon and Abel’s flock of children (plus their spouses and girlfriends and offspring) gather at the Vuillard homestead, where Junon is soldiering gorgeously on.
Some of the children are estranged from others. There are love triangles. There’s artistic angst. A young grandson has just plunged into a frightening bout of mental illness, an affliction he shares with his callous uncle Henri (Mathieu Almaric), the Vuillard family’s chain-smoking black sheep. Since the film is two and a half hours long, we have time to get to know these characters and to dip into subplot after subplot, each like its own film in exquisitely-wrought miniature. It’s not easy to watch. Despechin doesn’t hold our hand, nor does he tie things up neatly, nor does he refrain from employing whatever patchwork of filmic techniques seems appealing. My father joined me in front of the TV for awhile. When Junon’s nephew skipped into the Vuillard house at midday and uncorked a bottle of spirits that he’d secreted in a closet, my father breathed, “these people are messed up,” and quietly made his exit.
I was comforted by that very thing — the messed-up-ness. The acting was fab, of course, and the dialogue was wicked smart and the whole thing was unforgettable despite being long beyond belief, but that messed-up-ness turned out to be the important part, for me. Junon’s nephew goes on a solo pub crawl on Christmas Eve, that little grandson nearly stabs his mother, Junon smokes elegantly throughout, and Henri gets plastered, hits his brother-in-law, passes out, and then accompanies his mother to midnight mass. Merry Christmas.
But at no point does the family disintegrate, or react in the way they might be expected to in an American movie, or in my father’s book. No lectures for Junon along the lines of: “Put out the ciggies. You already have cancer, missy.” No. This is France. Life is twisted. They persevere. (Again, the less I know about France the better — I can go on happily believing that this is the way real French families act in the face of vice and trauma). All in all, they sort of have a nice Christmas. Even when Henri — drunk? Just knackered? — falls flat on his face in a crosswalk, he gets up and presses on. Which is all to say that I loved Un Conte de Noël for its willingness to try to get to the heart of things, however dark that heart, however unwieldy those things. Absent was my much-loved escapism, and it was all for the good.
I have a lot of free time now. Time for watching movies, reading books, and making mental lists of my incurable faults at 3 a.m. while staring crazily at the wall with one eye shut. It doesn’t feel like the best time to get all dreamy. Which is why I feel lucky that Un conte de Noël came to me when it did, in all its gritty, un-dreamy grimness. And now I’ve faced my real-life Christmas and am plunging into the rest of the holiday, an enforced period of isolation with my kin. On the 25th, of course, the isolation reached its peak: shops were closed, the streets were deserted, and slinging festive bows across the cat’s head was starting to look like tremendous fun — a little preview of what life might be like in a well-appointed fallout shelter. And now one awakes to thickening waistlines, another trip to Rue with that crumpled pic of Jean Seberg, slush on the sidewalks, leftover cookies crumbling in the pantry, the closing out of another year in which I have once again failed to read Ulysses. But one is lucky, very lucky, in one’s way. One tries to understand that there is a time for escapism and a time for life. One wakes up and gets dressed. One falls face-flat into the crosswalk, gets up, and presses on.
