Catching Up With... Arnaud Desplechin

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Mathieu Amalric of the latest James Bond film and Catherine Deneuve—of a hundred classic movies—lead the impeccable French cast of A Christmas Tale, the story of the Vuillard family's contentious Christmas gathering in the shadow of cancer. Deneuve plays the aging matriarch, Junon, who can only be saved by a bone marrow transplant, but finding a donor won't be easy because she has a very rare type. "I never doubted it," says her husband, congratulatory.

The most likely compatible donor would be a blood relative, but her doctor gently explains that the procedure is dangerous. A parent may donate to save a child, but the reverse just isn't done. "Why shouldn't Elizabeth give me life?" asks Junon about one of her grown children, coldly, hilariously. As with Desplechin's previous film, Kings and Queen, the filmmaker’s attitude is difficult to pin down. Is this a comedy or a tragedy or some sort of fiendish blend? The likely answer: all of the above.

The oddest thing about the film isn't necessarily the beautiful vulture of a mother, nor the painful things her grown children do and say to each other, but the way the film carries on a conversation with cinema itself. Desplechin furiously alludes to a cinephile's collection of films like A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Ten Commandments, The Big Chill, The River and Vertigo, and a DJ's mix of Mendelssohn, Mingus, Herrmann, pop, jazz, raga and hip-hop. The movie even closes with an extended reading from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, a comfort to its most distressed character. In short, he takes François Truffaut’s mantra to heart: “every minute, four ideas.”

But Desplechin’s allusions don’t exist for themselves; they’re the medium for those ideas. Each nod is a probe into a character or situation, a crack in someone’s gruff exterior or a balm over someone’s injuries, lifting the film above free association and simple snark toward a genuinely touching conclusion.

Paste caught up with Desplechin and asked where he got the idea for the film.

Desplechin: It's coming from films. You know? I had the governing lines of the plot, but I didn't know anything about the marrow transplant, just the movement of it, you know, the idea, that this amount of characters will be gathered in a large house. The title, the idea.

Do you have in Canada or the U.S., these sort of houses during Christmas? We call them les calendrier de l'avent, and each day of the month before Christmas you open a little window?

Paste: Yeah.

Desplechin: And you have a small gift, which is not a gift, it is just glowing, you know. And so the kids open 21, 22, 23, 24, Baby Jesus. So that kind of shape, you know, with scenes like little rooms. Plus, in the set, little rooms for each character.

Plus I saw this— I guess I saw it when I was a kid, but I didn't get it— but when I saw again Only Angels Have Wings by Howard Hawks, those characters were so brash, and I thought it was so modern. And I thought, OK, let's think about the last films I saw this year; they are much more cowardly than the Howard Hawks movie, which was made in the 1930s. And the speed of it [snaps his fingers three times]. And that speed in the moviemaking was driven by the speed of the characters themselves. You know what I mean, in this Howard Hawks movie the guys are all aviators?

Paste: Yeah.

Desplechin: Yeah, yeah, so they're risking their lives each day. I mean really risking— I mean the opening is amazing. You have a main character. He's with a girl. Oh, I would love to spend some time with you, let's try, let's go in a restaurant, then I take a plane, boom, the guy's dead. You know, 10 minutes of movie! So you understand that they don't have time to lose. They go straight to the point at the opening of each scene, which gives this pace that is so speedy, because the characters are all experiencing an emergency situation.

You say you can't do that in films. Yes, but I don't have the time because I'm an aviator. Wow! It's so brutal, you know, so I thought it would be nice to have a family of big mouths like that and acting that way.

So I was trying to find the emergency— and it became cancer, which is the big risk, and this idea of the transplant, you know, which is this idea of the danger, the threat, which forces all those characters to be that brash and impolite.

Paste: What was your concept behind the score for the film, the music? It’s especially important in this movie.

Desplechin: Yeah. It’s funny, when I start editing, as soon as I don't understand a scene, meaning I can't figure out where the most intense moment is, what's the best shot, what it's about, I remove the sound. I just put on some music, any kind of music, something that I happen to be listening to at the moment, and I edit like that visually, just like a silent film, with just the music.

And after that I put the sound back, and the dialogue always sounds right. Because if the acting is good, it's good. It doesn't need sound for that. So the music is the tool that helps me to understand what I did during the shooting, you know?

I will just take one very simple example: at the very opening you can see Junon, she's alone, it's quiet because now she's old and retired, it's in the provinces, small city, and she's fixing the tea for her husband. So it's cool and nice. And I added some beautiful ragas that I had.

So I start to ask myself this question, why does it work? Which drove me to the answer, you know, which is Jean Renoir's The River [a film set in India that uses similar music]. It's a film about family, death, failure, stuff like that, but you have to express it in a sweet way, so those ragas were perfect. Each time you would see Junon, you know, she was The River, which is a movie about a family gathering in a house, you know? So it just matched.

Paste: Another movie that sort of hovers over this film is Vertigo.

Desplechin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this one, I knew I would have to quote that sound, you know, because Henri's character, he’s the eternal widower. He had this wife, the Italian one, she just died [shortly after they were married], and his mother will die, you know.

And then the mother is in this museum, and the name of the ex-wife is Madeleine, so it's about women and loneliness and the fact that when you love a woman, you always loved another one before. So, it's quite deceptive, but it's nice. Let's be practical, because it does happen [laughs].