When you’re watching A Christmas Tale, Desplechin’s homage to that scene is unmistakable. It’s not a shot-by-shot transposition, nor is the score a literal lift from Bernard Herrmann. They’re evocations, uncannily familiar. The proof is, you’ll see exactly what I saw when I watched the film. Now why does Desplechin do that? For fun, I think. Just showing off, the way I sneaked some e. e. cummings lines into my Answer Man column this week, for no better reason than that I could. Of course, an homage has to work just as well if you don’t know its source. In fact, it may work better because you’re not distracted by the connection. But nothing like a little value-added, as the British say.
Here’s another way Desplechin pleases himself. He begins with the happy fact that Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni were the parents of Chiara Mastroianni. In A Christmas Tale, Chiara Mastroianni plays Deneuve’s daughter-in-law, a little poke in the ribs because when they’re in the same movie they are invariably playing mother and daughter. OK, so we know that.
But look where he goes with it. It’s obvious that Chiara has a strong facial resemblance to her mother. Desplechin doesn’t make any particular effort to make the point, although he can hardly avoid showing her full face sometimes. Here’s what he does. He almost makes it a point to demonstrate how much Chiara looks like her father. Luckily, her parents, when they conceived her, were the two most beautiful people in the world.
When he films her in profile and from very slightly below and behind, we’re looking at the essence of Mastroianni. The images burned into our memories from La Dolce Vita and elsewhere are of a sad, troubled man, resigned to disappointment and all the more handsome because of it. I always feel tender toward Mastroianni. No actor—no actor—was more loved by the camera. So here he is, and the character he is sad about is played by Catherine Deneuve. I imagine Desplechin and his cinematographer, Eric Gautier, discussing these shots sotto voce in a far corner of the sound stage.
The film must be packed with Desplechin’s invisible self-indulgences. Those we can see allow us to see the movie smiling to itself. Mastroianni smoked all the time. So does his daughter here, the same moody way. Desplechin has Deneuve smoking long, thin cigarettes, like Virginia Slims. When was the last time you saw anyone smoking those in a movie? Every time you see one, it’s a tiny distraction. I’ll tell you when. The last time was also Deneuve. They are the cigarettes she really smokes.
For long stretches A Christmas Tale seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so. These are not boring stretches. The movie is 151 minutes long and doesn’t feel especially lengthy. The actors are individually good. They work together to feel like a family. Subplots threaten to occupy the foreground. All the while, something is preparing itself beneath the surface. In the film’s last scene (in the final two shots, as I recall) all the hidden weight of the film uncoils and pounces. It really was about something, and it knew it all the time.
I recommend you seek other reviews to orient you to the actual plot. These words have been sort of value-added. If you have Vertigo, arm yourself before you attend.
Comfort and Joy
PG, 106 m., 1984
Bill Paterson (Alan), Eleanor David (Maddy), Clare Grogan (Charlotte), Alex Norton (Trevor). Directed by Bill Forsyth. Produced by Davina Belling, Paddy Higson, and Clive Parsons. Screenplay by Forsyth.
In the midst of the Halloween season, when the movies are mostly about murders with power drills, it’s time to observe that cheerful, good-hearted people do still exist on the screen. It’s just that they’re all Scottish. Here, for example, is Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy, one of the happiest and most engaging movies you are likely to see this year, and it comes from a Glasgow director who has made a specialty out of characters who are as real as you and me, and nicer than me.
Forsyth makes small movies about small events in the lives of man. His That Sinking Feeling was about some amateur thieves who came into the possession of a warehouse fill of stainless-steel sinks, right in the middle of an astonishingly slow market for sinks. Gregory’s Girl was about a kid who fell in love with a girl who was a better soccer player than he was. Local Hero was about some oil company executives who tried to buy the drilling rights to the most beautiful beach in Scotland, and ended up being charmed out of their socks by the local citizenry.
And now comes Comfort and Joy, about disc jockeys and ice cream wars. The hero, Alan Bird, is a radio announcer from 6:00 to 9:00 every morning. His nickname is “Dickey Bird,” and he specializes in the 6:10 a.m. traffic report (“There’s not one single car on the road.”) It is the Christmas season, time to be jolly, but then his girlfriend leaves him and he is deeply depressed until he catches a sparkle of dark eyes from the back of an ice cream truck.
He follows the truck, and when it stops he buys an ice cream and a candy bar from the pretty brunette inside. Just then, thugs pull up in a car, pile out, and smash the ice cream truck with cricket bats. They stop only long enough to recognize Dickey Bird and make a request for a record dedication.
Dickey’s new BMW has been injured in the fray. His troubles are only beginning. He is visited by representatives of Mr. McCool, a large Glascow ice cream chain, and they explain that the city has been carved up into territories, and that the notorious Mr. Bunny (operators of the brunette’s truck) are poachers. Partly because they force him and partly because he’s smitten with the girl, Dickey becomes a negotiator between the two sides in the ice cream wars, and the movie escalates into the kind of modulated insanity that Forsyth does so well.
I suppose a movie could be made about American ice cream wars, but the truck drivers would all be movie stars. Forsyth finds ordinary people. The star of Comfort and Joy is Bill Paterson, an offhand, pleasant chap who is always polishing his car. The other actors—including the Italians who own Mr. McCool—are the kind of low key caricatures that Forsyth knows how to draw so carefully that they never go over the edge. This is a wonderful movie, even apart from the standard Forsyth running gag about people who think they look like somebody else (this movie’s examples are the losers of a Bob Hope and Fred Astaire look—alike contest).
The Dead
PG, 83 m., 1987
Donal McCann (Gabriel Conroy), Anjelica Huston (Gretta Conroy), Donal Donnelly (Freddy Malins), Frank Patterson (Bartell D’Arcy), Dan O’Herlihy (Mr. Brown), Cathleen Delany (Aunt Julia), Maria McDermottroe (Molly Ivors). Directed by John Huston. Produced by Chris Sievernich and Wieland Schulz-Keil. Screenplay by Tony Huston, based on the short story “The Dead” by James Joyce.
John Huston was dying when he directed The Dead. Tethered to an oxygen tank, hunched in a wheelchair, weak with emphysema and heart disease, he was a perfectionist attentive to the slightest nuance of the filming. James Joyce’s story, for that matter is all nuance until the final pages. It leads by subtle signs to a great outpouring of grief and love, but until then, as Huston observed, “The biggest piece of action is trying to pass the port.” He began shooting in January 1987, finished in April, and at the end of August, he died. He was 81.