One of the many whole family scenes in Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (2008)
Mary Poppins Returns (2018)
Friends,
Over these few Christmas days I watched two new (to me) Christmas movies, read three Christmas stories I’ve never read before, and renewed my acquaintance with a series of Christmas chapters in a strong masterpiece of Victorian fiction. I most enjoyed the extraordinary creation of a several day Christmas time together by Arnaud Desplechin in his much-awarded A Christmas tale and was fully absorbed by six different households and their experience of Christmas in Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm. I’m with those reviewers who found that Mary Poppins Rebooted half-a-century later fails to enchant, and think anibundel comes closest to explaining why. The three stories I read, two by Anton Chekhov, and a third by Margaret Oliphant, suggest what was expected from a mainstream Christmas story in the 19th differs considerably from the 20th.
In this blog we’ll stay with movies, and in my next turn to stories.
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Sylvia’s children, Paul, grandfather and Sylvia doing a play of the children’s own device during the week (A Christmas Tale)
I can’t speak too highly of Desplechin’s film. It must may be the best or most mature Christmas movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen many. Before this I would say John Huston’s The Dead (from Joyce’s story) and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (an appropriation of Mansfield Park) were the finest, with the 1951 Christmas Carol archetypally old-fashioned, still delivering a depth of inward anguish, anger and redemption hard to match anywhere, partly because of the performance of Alistair Sim and partly the use of some film noir and fantafy techniques — and Dickens’s famous bitter and joyous lines. But they feel so limited in scope and what’s presented in comparison. Love Actually is vulgar in comparison (and finds sexual predation a bit too humorous with Bill Nighy’s impeccable parody dating just a bit); It’s a Wonderful Life — so meaningfully anti-capitalist for us today, with its angel Clarence seeking promotion and no one doing hysteria the way Jimmy Stewart can (I weep each time) — has problems — the depiction of the wife had she not married as this dried up spinster librarian afraid of her shadow is grating. There are none of these kinds of mistakes in Desplechin’s film.
I’d say if you are alone (like I fundamentally am now) and want to experience Christmas with other intelligent well-meaning real enough people sit for the full 2 and 1/2 slow-moving hours and then watch the 2 hours of features too. It’s the story of a large bourgeois family who all get together for the first time in several years because the mother, Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has a cancer which requires a bone-marrow transplant if she is to have any chance of living even for two years. Two of the family members have compatible blood types, one Paul (Emile Berling) the 15 year old troubled son of the eldest daughter, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a gifted playwright, who loathes the other, her brother, Henri (Mathieu Amalric) to the point five years she demanded her father, Abel (Jean-Paul Rousillon) and her mother cut off all relationship with him in return for her paying the enormous debts Henri had racked up; if someone did not pay it, her parents would lose the family home.
A major character across the film is this large comfortable ramshackle home and its landscape, both of which frame and is a brooding and comforting presence throughout all the scenes which don’t take place specifically in Roubaix. Roubaix is the film’s subtitle, a small French city in which Desplechin grew up and which he photographs lovingly, realistically in small interludes of shots. The key characters are Abel (the father), Junon (the mother), Henri and Elizabeth (two of their grown children), with Amalric as Henri delivering a character of extraordinary complexity and interest, vulnerable, resentful, despairing, kind, insightful by turns.
Mathieu Amalric as Henri talking earnestly to his younger brother, Ivan (Melvil Poupaid) as they decorate the family tree.
Back history (like a novel): Abel and Junon had four children, and the film opens with the death of the eldest, Joseph at age six as a flashback of memory in Abel’s mind — as he and his wife await the arrival of the family as it is today for Christmas. Elizabeth and their youngest son, Ivan, have married. Elizabeth’s husband, Claude (Hippolyte Girardot) leaves at one point, so incensed does he get against the tactless Henri, when he is having to deal with his son Paul having had a breakdown, and spent time in an asylum. Claude is preparing his mind for a coming interview with authorities to try to get the boy out of the asylum while Elizabeth wants to put him back there. By film’s end the boy will not return to the asylum but stay with his grandparents, Claude has returned, and Elizabeth been helped by talk with her father.
Ivan’s wife, Sylvia (Chiara Mastroiana, Deneuve’s actual daughter) while reacting with real affection to her two small boys whenever they are around, is essentially bored by them and her life, and during the course of the film discovers that Simon (Laurent Capelluto) a cousin who lives with Abel and Junon, and works in their dye factory (the source of the family income) is deeply in love with her, and gave her up to Ivan after he lost a bet. She apparently had preferred Simon to Ivan; he is one of several family members who absents himself from the group now and again — he drinks too heavily, maybe is bisexual, is doing nothing with his life. So Sylvia finds him alone in a bar on Christmas eve, and they spent a night in bed together, something accepted by Ivan, who himself lives unconventionally as a musician commanding large audiences in rock concerts, one of which we attend.
Henri’s first wife, died in a car accident a month after they married:
Henri showing Faunia a photo of his long dead wife
Henri has had several partners since, and the present woman, Jewish, Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos) finds herself feeling alien, Henri’s response is he wants to leave too; at one point she goes shopping with Junon, and without telling her, Junon leaves the shop, driving herself back, so Faunia has to get back herself. She does leave early.
Simon, Sylvia, Ivan, Junon in a corridor (left to right)
A complicated family you might say – but no more than many families. I assure you, you will not be bored; it’s funny, wry, quiet and peaceful (as they watch appalling movies), suddenly all is fraught emotion and then they calm down again and exchange presents.
The stories close with Elizabeth intoning the epilogue from Midsummer’s Night Dream, as she overlooks Roubaix. This last literary quotation (of several) signals the underlying mood that holds it together: acceptance (except during eruptions) of one another, their fates, with barbed raillery mixed with profound thoughts, sometimes read aloud —
Abel reads Goethe to Elizabeth
What helps hold everyone together: the house where they dwell together. All they do in and for it. The town they know. Even the cemetery close by where their baby brother was buried. The father is the final authority all the while going off to clean up the table, the yard after fireworks were set up all over it; the mother is respected by all even if she had the disconcerting habit of telling this or that child she never cared for them. So a combination of tradition and concrete truth. Things. Prickly, messy and companionable (Henri goes walking in the snow with Paul and helps him), filled with shots of beautiful winter, ghastly streets, and the house and rooms every which way, this movie finally helps us to endure on. Chapter headings, days of the week also named by mood, characters who turn around and address us, hospital and bar scenes, it’s all there, Christmas time. The hope in the film that they do get together, help one another, share their memories, which is to say their deepest identities, has some fruition.
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Look at the look in Blunt’s eye — cold as ice
The Mary Poppins movie is not the most tedious Christmas film I’ve ever seen — I give that prize to the Muppet Scrooge story. But it can come close. It’s a child’s movie because the main action, the rescuing is precipitated by the children. I bring it up because Disney has such a prominent presence in our culture, as a girl I loved the books by P.L Travers (wildly disparate from the 1964 movie), which have yet to be done justice to by any of the movies (including Saving Mr Banks), two of which have been used as Christmas icons. Emily Blunt herself played the wife who dies, a central role in Sondheim’s Into the Woods, which was another Christmas day extravaganza, and this gives us our clue to what goes wrong.
Emily Blunt as the despairing hysterically lost baker’s wife (2014)
Sondheim’s song was simply about how in life sometimes we end up walking alone: “Sometimes people leave you/Halfway through the wood.” Paradoxically the film also tried to bring something of the original thwarted feelings of the book: each time an adventure is over, Mary Poppins denies it took place; she is all vanity, egoism, discusses nothing, orders everyone about (Blunt tried for a soupcon of this). Anibundel suggests the problem is the film took on “deep emotional themes” the Disneyfiction can’t include. Manohla Dargis agrees that it follows the trajectory of the old songs; and finds it uncanny that it never captures the original “delicacy of feeling” or bliss.
Lin-Manuel Miranda imitating one of Van Dyke’s routines
I’m inclined to think the actors didn’t believe in it the way they did 50 years ago; Emily Mortimer was thrown away; Julie Walters was a stray from 19th century music hall; the occasional nervous plangency allowed Wishaw went nowhere, and Lin-Manuel seemed to be biking to no purpose, round and round. What seems to me important is capitalism won out; no subversion allowed. All the talk of the movie was money, certificates, and while Dick Van Dyke stepped in for a moment to dance a delicate shoe number and remind us trust in one another was the key to the first bank’s success, that was lost in the hard noise of triumph. The principals worked so hard because it was all counter-productive; the less true Christmas message they had, the more vigorous they became. When they went high up in balloons, they were not escaping from their world. The material as brought down not from Travers, not from her book:
Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers very irritated by what Disney did to her book (Saving Mr Banks, 2013)
But the previous naive travesty won’t work any more because we are cut off from social feeling.
Is the Mary Poppins in the center having any emotion with respect to anyone around her?
They wanted more than a Sondheim production, where rousing music and slow depth simple words convey significance. The movie lacked haunting music because it was not permitted the real melancholy of life’s existence (as caught in Abel’s words in the book he reads; another review by Jen Cheney this time of the DVD set). Streep’s song could have fitted the movie’s story: the Banks children and Michael Banks need to be righted. But one visit from MP will not do it. This was a ludicrously over-produced fantasy, a commercial for Disneyland, pictures of which opened and closed the movie itself.
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What should a Christmas story be? Trollope said “the savor of Christmas” was a story that instilled (in his language) “charity,” which translates literally into acts of giving. We’ll explore this next time. At the end of A Christmas Tale, Henri has given life’s blood, risked his life, on the chance he could save his mother’s. There has been no talk of money here; what tore the family apart was money.
The church scene repeats the arrangement of characters in the court scene only then it’s Abel next to Henri
I mentioned my DVD included two disks. As Cheney says, “Arnaud’s tale” is disappointing: we are told how central the house is to the film, and the city, and these connect back to Desplechin’s life and Almaric talks of how he understood and played Henri. But it’s the one hour documentary movie that illuminates why he chose to make a Christmas movie:
“L’Aimée,” on the other hand, immerses us completely in the tale of Desplachin’s relatives: his grandmother, who was diagnosed with tuberculosis in her 30s; his father, Robert, who was forced to live apart from his contagious mother, then grow up without her after her death; and the many relatives who played a role in nurturing Robert into adulthood. Like “A Christmas Tale,” a film that clearly was inspired by this documentary effort,” “L’Aimée” introduces us to all the heartbreak, joy and tucked-away memories that comprise one family’s history. And that, in its very French, thoughtful and occasionally somber way, is what Christmas is all about.
Into the Woods was not about charity but it was about heartbreak, memory and camaraderie as solace. A roll of the dice, chance moments, human obtuseness and self have caused much damage but by the end (as Philip Lopate says in the essay that accompanies the DVD — such a lot of stuff in this DVD case) even the depressed Elizabeth “gets her bearings.” And moments of grace no matter how odd (like when the nurse does not stop Henri from drinking and smoking the morning he is to do his part of the procedure) enable the people together to invent livable lives. No one altogether crushed, and everyone at some point smiles with some shared or individual enjoyment.
Walking in snow
Playing piano, others listening
At one of the many meals ….
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
So . . . is the only way to enjoy a Mary Poppins movie is if it closely adheres to Travers’ stories? Because I recently watched the 1964 movie and I still enjoyed it, despite my knowledge of the Travers tales.
That’s an unfair reduction of which I said and shows you never clicked on either of my earlier blogs, the first which finds much charm in the first Mary Poppins movie, and much real emotion and value in Saving Mr Banks. I say that PL Travers’s books in this case are better than any of the film adaptations thus far, and that this particular is the worst of the lot as US and UK norms become more sociopathic.
See the face-book comment was deleted (!) and I have managed to keep only these two paragraphs:
“I was, though, deeply, deeply disappointed at the new film’s revised economic message. The strength of the old film was its radical questioning of mindless capitalism: Michael Banks absolutely refuses to invest his “tuppence wisely in the bank.” Instead, he prefers to “feed the birds” or fly a kite: “with tuppence for paper and string, you can have your own set of wings.” But in the new film (spoiler!), the thirty-year-old tuppence not fed the birds or been spent on a kite: it has been turned over to the bankers and has earned enough compound interest to save the impoverished Banks family. Gone is the concern for those outside the Banks/bank circle: the city birds or the city poor.
In a telling moment in the new film, we glimpse the prostrate body of the old bird-woman, on the steps of St. Paul’s, no longer communing with the birds she so loves. She’s now passed out–or dead, victim of a Tory “austerity budget.” Last month, I learned a new term, “market fundamentalism”: the belief (unsubstantiated) that only the competitive market can provide healthcare or incarcerate prisoners or educate children. Stuff and nonsense, as Mary Poppins would say. Since the Thatcherite/Reaganite 80s, this pernicious doctrine has infected the countries I love, and I was sorry to see that it has eaten at what was deeply humane and decent in the first _Mary Poppins_.
Doug
He also commented on his posting:
I did like the new one, and there’s a lovely cross-class romance. I liked the songs too.
To which I replied:
Doug, I see you more or less basically agreed with me but you were willing to accept as compensation some of the songs and the cross-class romance. That last was pallid, hardly there: Lin Manuel and Emily Mortimer scarcely say a word. As Anibundel pointed out the words of some of the songs are hard and true (Meryl Streep) but they belong to another movie, and I found them utterly so fast and given so little context, they were thrown away, hardly registered.
[…] have now completed this holiday time. I’ve reported on Mary Poppins Returns and our Christmas day meal at our usual local Chinese restaurant where we again shared a Peking […]
[…] « Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale & the Disney Mary Poppins Re-booted 50 years on […]
[…] « Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale & the Disney Mary Poppins Re-booted 50 years on […]
[…] lightly in butter on a frying pan) with tea and then settled together to watch the wondrous French A Christmas Tale. She enjoyed it as deeply as I. One night also I went on a date (the first in 52 years) — an […]
A year later: 12/22/2019 I also started my “holiday” viewing and re-saw Depleschin’s A Christmas Tale — it’s very like a novel, the characters all complex. This time through I realized I had not understood the mother’s story at the end — it’s worth it just for the reality of what is inferred as we go along — the part played by Catherine Deneuve. Yhis is not a fair description of it though it has the literal details accurately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Tale
Junon married her husband not because he is handsome or was originally rich, or of high status, but for his intelligence, kindness of heart and his competence has made them comfortable: his cloth dying business does very well. By the end of the movie, the lost soul, Simone, is joining the world again by working for the father.
Junon is probably dying; she is truthful woman and say she does not like her middle son because of the base things he has done to his father and sister among others. But she accepts him as her son; by the end when he makes a real sacrifice, we are told that her body rejected the blood from his bone marrow. She is accepting of everyone, not an idealist. The close relationship in the family is between the sister, Elizabeth, and the father.
Trollope says a Christmas story “should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to instil others with a desire for Christmas religious thought or Christmas festivities,–, better yet, with Christmas charity. Such was the case with Dickens when he wrote his two first Christmas stories.”
That does not mean it has to be cheerful or show people rejoicing or even happy. That demand comes from other parts of our mainstream group culture. I’d say Trollope’s Widows Mite is one of his stories that comes closest to this ideal — it meditates the question of what is charity, what is charitable behavior. Often such stories have families coming together as that is what is often done around this time. LIttle Women opens on Christmas, but one where there will be no presents as there is no money for Christmas doings.
In Desplechin’s story we see a family getting together and for the first in years allowing one of the sons to be part of the family once again. We see them trying if not resolve issues at least exercise forbearance towards one another, and we see efforts to help each other, to understand one another, and an act of giving: the estranged son has an operation where he gives blood form his bone marrow to help keep his mother alive — as I understand the film story. There are also moments of “jubilation” (the word is not that in French but that’s its meaning) – just exhilaration, dancing, fireworks, exchange of gifts.
This article in this week’s New Yorker shows how much that we see on TV and films is now meretricious, controlled by the present representative of the old Hallmark corporation. https://tinyurl.com/r2tbvoq
by Sarah Larson, she shows that that Hallmark brand of happiness (pose, pretense) is the center of a whole industry of movies, especially for Christmas; in the last part of the essay you learn the origins of the Hallmark card industry
[…] end of A Christmas Tale) […]
[…] Then, what the hell, I put on Arnaud’s Desplechin’s nearly 3 hour A Christmas Tale — it’s a wonderful ever so complicated movie of a large in name and reality of culture contemporary Catholic family. Autobiographical. I still haven’t gotten all that happened — my third time through at least. Cats settle down. I enjoyed it very much — you are intended to enter into it fully — four or five phases of ritual activity held together by family traumas acted out, get togethers, chief story the mother (Catherine de Neuve) has terrible leukemia, fatal, and needs bone marrow transplants, a grandson (had been put in a child’s special school but will not go back by the end — breakdown) and the wayward son are compatible. End of movie, operation is as far as can be told success. In some form or other all are united variously Several stories, immersed, involved. Characters go walking in snow. Camera takes us to all sorts of places in the real Roubaix — beautiful photographs of center of Northern French once industrial town with decorated lit tree. See blog […]
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