Tag: Un conte de Noël
Cannes 05/16 – Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘A Christmas Tale’ and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ‘Three Monkeys’
Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘A Christmas Tale’
In the first US sale of a Competition title at Cannes, Wild Bunch has sold Arnaud Desplechin’ s A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) to IFC.
The family drama, which screens here on Friday, stars an ensemble cast including Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Devos, Anne Consigny and Melvil Poupaud.
Arnaud Desplechin has made a movie rife with dire family secrets, ghosts and tortured survivors. “Un conte de Noël” is a wild Christmas story set in cold, provincial northern France.
Catherine Deneuve is regal Junon, the mother. She and her husband, Abel, played by Jean-Paul Roussillon, are having their children over for the holidays. Joseph, their youngest, died as a child of a rare genetic illness, but his memory hovers over the household. There is a daughter played by Anne Cosigny, who seems to live in perpetual mourning.
Then, there are the surviving sons and their women: Chiara Mastroianni plays the wife of Ivan, (Melvil Poupaud), and Emmanuelle Devos, a passing fancy of Henri, the tormented, unloved son, (Mathieu Amalric). His parents conceived him in the hope that, through a bone marrow transplant, he could save Joseph, but he failed, and thus failed to win their love. He has come home to wreak some havoc.
