Lions in the Winter
“A Christmas Tale.”
by Jimmy So

The ensemble (pronounce it in French, if you prefer) of “A Christmas Tale” comprises only a single family, and that’s plenty. The big-hearted Abel Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon) is married to the cold-hearted Junon (Catherine Deneuve), and they have three children: the emotionally wounded Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), the despicable screw-up Henri (Mathieu Amalric), and the least sunken of them all, Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), had his own troubles in the past and might not be so free of those misfortunes after all—his wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, the real-life daughter of Deneuve, and you know the father if you recognize the last name or her unique features) is in love with his cousin. He very likely knows, but he doesn’t seem all that bothered when on Christmas morning he cheerfully wakes up the two adulterers. Maybe keeping it cool is how it’s done in France; maybe it’s rather normal for two grownups to share a bed in the crowded and colorful Vuillard home.

There was a fourth child, the eldest son Joseph, and it’s hinted that Henri was conceived simply to give the sick Joseph a chance at a transplant. Henri was unable to save his brother, who died at the age of seven, and now the human bone marrow dispenser is once again called upon—Junon has cancer and wants to, in her own words, “take back what’s mine.” Henri is a possible donor, and Elizabeth’s teenage son, Paul, is also compatible, but he’s just as lost as Henri—he’s suicidal and prone to seeing a black dog in mirrors. There are many more side stories and a few other interesting characters, and it’s difficult to find a central narrative in the film—despite what the title promised, you’ll be disappointed if you expect a Christmas tale. Events occur not because they advance the plot but as a way to paint the relationships between the folks of the Vuillard clan. This is a portrait of a household during the holidays, not a Christmas fable. The jazz played on the stereo is Charles Mingus and not Vince Guaraldi, the book read aloud is Nietzsche and not Dr. Seuss. Christmas, to the Vuillards, is not so much a ritual as an excuse to bring the many antagonistic parts of a family under one roof, and the film slowly makes the claim that such is the essence of the yuletide season—Christmas is like a Big Brother-esque reality show, if you will, and survival is the game.

The Vuillard family is almost too dysfunctional for one movie, albeit a two-and-a-half-hour one. Robert Altman was the king of the stylized ensemble, and nobody has managed to succeed him since his death. Arnaud Desplechin, best known in America for 2004’s “Kings and Queen,” has made a case for snatching the crown back to the land of Jean Renoir, the French having invented ensemble films. Desplechin uses every trick in the book: iris fades, keyhole peeps, shadow puppets, actors directly addressing the camera, and clips of “Funny Face,” Max Reinhardt’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Ten Commandments.” Desplechin’s efforts happily suggest a small revival of the form.

But the most noteworthy accomplishment of “A Christmas Tale” is not Desplechin’s conducting of a troupe of actors, but the performance of a particular one. Pauline Kael once lamented Katharine Hepburn becoming weak and pitiful in “The Lion in Winter" and chafed at Bette Davis going “soft” in “Pocketful of Miracles.” The two greatest Hollywood heroines aged into what smart audiences loved them for not being: The tough and white-hot Davis, in the winter of her career, had become either sweet and lovable or grotesque; the aristocratic and clever Hepburn turned woeful and quivering. Kael was dismayed by their betrayals, and thought that Hepburn, above all, used her personal romances and battles to draw upon people’s feelings for her and not her character. “When Hepburn, the most regal of them all, contemplates her blotches and wrinkles with tears in her anxious eyes, it’s self-exploitation, and it’s horrible.”

We have long loved Deneuve for being the reigning ice queen, imperturbable against any foolishness around her. “A Christmas Tale” could be the last word on her chilly strength: Junon, while smoking and chatting relatively cordially with Henri on a swing—clearly a scene given to a reconciliation—without so much as a thought informs her son that she never loved him, as if there could not be a more natural assertion. It isthe most natural response—no self-respecting parent can love Henri, and “A Christmas Tale” is very much about warring relatives being thrown together during the holidays and having to suffer one another without sinking into each others’ arms and tearfully declaring their love. The plot provides plenty of chances for a lesser actor to interpret Junon as an aging beauty pitying herself, passive-aggressively begging for love in the face of demise and death. But Denueve doens't play a shell of her former glory; she plays Junon, who is cruel, cool, at times even carefree about her illness. It is not that established actors shouldn't cast against type; they simply shouldn't infuse a role with enterprising nostalgia. Deneuve has yet to exploit the audience or make herself piteous—how young and beautiful she used to be, but age is only making her smarter, funnier, more serene, and devastatingly dazzling. She is far from going soft, and lets hope the mighty never fall. ♦

What’s in a Name?

“Slumdog Millionaire”

By Jimmy So

I met a friend for a drink just after I came out of “Slumdog Millionaire,” and I outlined the plot to him without giving away the ending. “Wait a sec, you mean to tell me that in the beginning you don’t know that he’s won the million bucks? The title’s not exactly keeping that a secret.” I suppose in a literal interpretation, the inclusion of the word “millionaire” would mandate that the "slumdog" Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) ought to win the Indian version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” But titles also come in the form of the vague, the ironic, the satiric, and even the outright absurd. We need not know to which category “Slumdog Millionaire” belongs to except to recognize that it is a good title: the film is as peppy as a puppy and fantastical as a millionaire-dream.

“Slumdog Millionaire” opens with the misstep of Jamal being tortured by a police inspector (Irrfan Khan)—frankly, Patel looks more stoned than mutilated, but apparently America is not the only country fond of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The police accuse Jamal, an uneducated 18-year-old orphan who grew up in the slums, of cheating in “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” He is one question away from 20 million rupees, but before that final multiple choice the show propitiously runs out of time and takes a one night recess, while a billion and a half hardly affluent Indians ironically and fervently wonder if the rich-poor gap can widen just enough for Jamal to squeeze through.

Jamal, of course, is busy getting tickled by electric shocks, but he doesn’t have a confession—he has flashbacks. He explains how he has come to know the answer to each of the question, and in the process serves up the ultimate rebuke to pedantry—a rich and eventful life has provided him with esoterica that might just happen to appear on a bad but very lucrative quiz show. His first explanation is a giggle. Asked to pick out the name of a Bollywood star, Jamal recounts how, as a kid, he crawled through feces three feet deep just to get the autograph of the superstar.

Next he tells of how his mother is killed in the 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots (a rather incongruous explanation of another answer lies in this episode), and Jamal befriends a waif named Latika—on the other hand, Jamal’s brother, Salim, seems to have something against her. The three of them are trained by a sinister gang to beg for money, but they escape, only that Salim leaves Latika behind. Why does Jamal know that Benjamin Franklin is on the U.S. 100-dollar note? Because, looking for Latika, Jamal reunited with a fellow slumdog who was not so lucky as the Maliks and had by then become a blind beggar, and he asked Jamal to look at who’s on the currency to confirm that it was a Benjamin. He knows the inventor of the revolver because Salim used a Colt pistol to help Jamal rescue Latika. You get the idea.

Surely you know the trajectory of this tried and true story, but the fact is that you don’t know if Jamal gets the last question right until the end of the film, regardless of what the title suggests. There is ample suspense to captivate an audience—twenty million rupees are clinging onto one of four possible answers to a multiple-choice question. The title sequence, itself tied to four answer choices, might give something away, but does it even matter?

The opening title card reads: “Jamal is within one right answer of winning the game show, so how did he get here?” The letter they want you to pick is “D: It is written.” Simon Beaufoy wrote the script, based on the novel Q and A by the Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup. I wager that the two men are familiar with “Lawrence of Arabia”—the writing’s in the sand, surely, in the life of T. E. Lawrence, a man so driven to defy everything before him he only makes sense of his actions later. In the famous desert scene so engulfing you can taste the granules in your mouth, Gasim, an Arab fighter, fell off his camel unnoticed during the night, and O’Toole’s Lawrence seizes the opportunity like a serpent spotting Eve, and against the advice of the Bedouins, turns back to look for him in the endless Nefud Desert. “Nothing is written!” Lawrence snaps at them; he manages to rise above not only the Bedouins but the desert and destiny as well, saving Gasim—but the sand has the last word, and later Lawrence personally shoots Gasim to prevent a blood feud among his fighters. The plot twist suggests the decisive victory of fate—after all, where would mythmaking be without it? Nevertheless let us be reminded that Lawrence was not above little contrivances himself, and if anything is written he is likely to have written it, and made it all up if he can help it.

“It is so contrived!” is the complaint I hear most often about “Slumdog Millionaire.” But what do you expect—a film executively produced by fate? Or will you settle for a movie contrived by standard human beings? Once upon a time, movies were manufactured products of entertainment filled with set pieces to be devoured and enjoyed. Flights of fancy weren’t always results of dream sequences or signs of magical realism. You took the cosmic amusement of yesteryear Hollywood in stride. They used to manufacture flights of fancy not with expensive CGI but the old fashioned way, by taking a cute but implausible turn in the plot. Not all films are miracles of realism in the natural rhythm of life. And if you rightly anticipate that I take the view that they don’t make them like they used to, I am unabashed about my romanticism for the spirit of the Golden Age.

Who else shares my fondness for supple storytelling, of bending reality to one’s liking? After a late-night layover in a Calcutta motel watching a Dharmendra (the Burt Lancaster of Bollywood) doubleheader with two Indian mates I consider brothers, and a subsequent in-flight entertainment featuring 2006’s “Om Shanti Om,” (only one of the biggest grossing Hindi films in history, an Indian redux of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Phantom of the Opera”) I can say that the subcontinent of South Asia still has a good appetite for unblushing cinematic thrills worthy of the exclamation “That’s Entertainment!” The Tinseltown of the1920s to 1950s has immigrated to Mumbai, studio system and formula and all. In making “Slumdog Millionaire,” the British director Danny Boyle not only pays homage to the sari and mehndi, but he takes on the very spirit of what a movie out of India might feel like.

“Slumdog Millionaire” has the look of neon worship, a love for the vibrant urban life found in the best Taiwan and Hong Kong films but absent in American cinema since the gentrification of the Big Apple. Megalopolises are both beautiful and dangerous. Heroes survive by running past colorful lights, getting lost in the downtown maze, and they are rewarded with the temporary relief of having been rescued by a city. The best part of "Slumdog Millionaire" is the last—a full Bollywood dance number on the platforms of a train station, involving almost the entire cast. American cinema has long averted its eyes from such frivolities. It is written that the direction of film is to go another way, but in our return to Depression-era economics can we not find the time for a short reunion with Depression comedies in all their confounding, twisted paradoxes, and hope, once again, that a slumdog can indeed become a millionaire? ♦