A timeless family 'Christmas'

Catherine Deneuve is the matriarch in ''A Christmas Tale.'' (Jean-claude lother)

To tweak Tolstoy: All happy families may be alike, but all unhappy-family movies are entertaining in their own ways.

The cliché even extends to nationalities: American home-for-the-holiday movies are mostly about embarrassment and spit-up (if the trailer for "Four Christmases" is any indication), the Danes bring sexual abuse to the party (1998's "The Celebration"), and the French - ah, well, the French.

Submitted for your lasting approval: "A Christmas Tale," in which several generations of great Gallic actors hunker down for a gloriously unrepressed Yuletide weekend. Blood is drawn (as is spinal fluid), and death is never far from the door. Yet I'd be hard-pressed to name a film released this year that feels more elusively alive. With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

Fittingly, there's a legend at the head of the table: Catherine Deneuve as Junon, matriarch of the Vuillard family in the French city of Roubaix. Recently diagnosed with early-stage leukemia, she's looking to her family members to provide bone marrow for experimental treatment, if a donor match can be found.

Her grown children push and bicker to be the chosen one. Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), the good daughter, a tightly wound playwright, hasn't spoken to her brother, prodigal bad boy Henri (Mathieu Amalric, the eco-villain of "Quantum of Solace"), in five years. Youngest is the rangy Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), who has overcome a troubled youth to find happiness with Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni) and their adorable twin boys (Thomas and Clément Obled).

Pére Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon) fritters around the edges like a wise old toad, while Simon (Laurent Capelluto), a cousin carrying an eternal torch for Sylvia, sighs and smiles wanly from the corners. There are ghosts present, too, living and dead. The former is Elizabeth's schizophrenic teenage son Paull (Emile Berling), silently trembling as he tries to contain his demons. The latter, unseen, is the family's first child, Joseph, long gone at age 5 from bone cancer but hanging silently behind every conversation. His death is the Vuillards' original wound; in their haphazard, human way, they're still trying to heal decades on.

The holiday unfolds as these things do in movies, with shouting, food, bed-hopping, food, amateur theatricals, food. Director Arnaud Desplechin, who co-wrote the script with Emmanuel Bourdieu, isn't interested in plot so much as letting his gifted ensemble ricochet off each other. "A Christmas Tale" is emotional billiards, and if anyone's the eight ball it's Amalric - his Henri is a rampaging, rebellious comic invention, torn between cherishing his family and telling them all to go to hell. (More than once, frazzled beyond repair, he just pitches forward on his face.)

True, this is Other People's Meshugas, and it might be tiring if Desplechin didn't keep the movie spinning like a top. The camerawork is steady but the soundtrack is not, interleaving Grégoire Hetzel's score with throbbing pop and rhapsodic classical music. (Mendelssohn's overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" pops up repeatedly, as does the 1935 Hollywood version of the Shakespeare play on TV in the living room; if anything, "Christmas Tale" could be subtitled "A Midwinter Week's Reverie.")

Best of all, the director has fashioned a love-letter to French film and the entire history of cinema, all packed into the cozy confines of one bourgeois townhouse. There are title cards and silent-era iris shots; one plot development feels like a frolicsome echo of Truffaut's "Jules et Jim." Amalric and Consigny played stroke victim and transcriber in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"; several characters have the same names as unrelated characters in Desplechin's 2004 film "Kings and Queen." When Junon remarks that she finds her daughter-in-law Sylvia rather dull, the joke is in knowing that Deneuve is teasing her own daughter by Marcello Mastroianni.

Deneuve, of course, practically represents the last half-century of French movies all by herself. She wears that history lightly, chic and unperturbed by the 100 or so films in which she has appeared and by the shadow of death that hangs over Junon. "A Christmas Tale" is about a family laughing and crying off its own curse, and the joy is in knowing the filmmaker and we are laughing and crying right along with them. Just in time for the holidays, Desplechin has given movie lovers a Christmas present for the ages.