The very first full film festival I went to, when I was really starting to get into world cinema, was back in 1997, and I still remember that my least favourite film was probably Arnaud Desplechin’s How I Got into an Argument (My Sex Life), massively overlong and also melodramatic in a way that I didn’t connect to at all. To be fair, I was probably too young for it, but it did introduce me to Mathieu Amalric, who was already a veteran of Desplechin’s films by that point. I can’t say I’ve necessarily warmed up on the strained familial drama, but I still find myself only tolerating this film. The title, it should be said—at least going by the film’s title card—is actually Un conte de Noël: Roubaix! I’m not exactly sure that this setting deserves the point d’exclamation, looking to be a fairly unmemorable town just on the Belgian border in the north-east of France, not too far from Lille, but it appears to have some kind of hold over this family, who are coming together not just for Christmas but to support Catherine Deneuve’s matriarch, who has been diagnosed with cancer. It’s where the director was born, though, so it makes sense as a setting for his Christmas film. He still loves a long film, too, it seems, but amongst it all there are some tender and touching moments, in quiet times when Amalric just takes it down a notch.
CREDITS
Director Arnaud Desplechin; Writers Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu; Cinematographer Eric Gautier; Starring Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Devos; Length 152 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Thursday 23 December 2021.
filmcentric 