Un Conte De Noël

Un Conte De Noël
Arnaud Desplechin
France, 2008

We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason. We have never sought after ourselves - so how should we one day find ourselves? It has rightly been said that: 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'; our treasure is to be found in the beehives of knowledge. As spiritual bees from birth, this is our eternal destination, our hearts are set on one thing only - 'bringing something home'. Whatever else life has to offer, so-called 'experiences' - who among us is serious enough for them? Or has enough time for them? In such matters, we were, I fear, never properly 'Abreast of things': our heart is just not in it - nor, if it comes to it, are our ears! Imagine someone who, when woken suddenly from divine distraction and self-absorption by the twelve loud strokes of the noon bell, asks himself: 'What time is it?' In much the same way, we rub our ears after the fact and ask in complete surprise and embarrassment: 'What was that we just experienced?', or even 'Who are we really?' Then we count back over in retrospect, as I said, every one of the twelve trembling strokes of our experience, our life, our being-and alas! lose our count in the process... And so we necessarily remain a mystery to ourselves, we fail to understand ourselves, we are bound to mistake ourselves. Our eternal sentences reads: "Everyone is furthest from himself' - of ourselves, we have no knowledge...

This is the bit of Nietzshe's On The Genealogy of Morals that Abel reads to Elizabeth at a moment when she realizes just how distant and lost she has become. The words are of course beautiful and full of meaning, but the way in which the text is used within the film becomes the very glue that holds each scene together.

Small details throughout this film were so much of what made it magic. The opening shots of marionettes invoke that other truly magical and otherworldly Christmas movie, Fanny & Alexander. The heart-shaped necklace Elizabeth receives from Spatafora becomes the dangling background of a transition. The sudden cut to still photographs on a white screen becomes that quiet moment you find for yourself during an overwhelming occasion such as this. The mitochondria of color-soaked cells. References you could spend days trying to figure out. The revelation of the camera lens moving out and in. The illusion of ghosts unseen. The toss of a coin. The way the characters speak directly at the camera from time to time. Chiara Mastroianni playing the disliked daughter-in-law Sylvia to her real life mother.

The way Catherine Deneuve looks in a brilliantly red coat. That hair. The quiet raga that introduces her to us. Junon.

Overall, I was captivated by this film. It is lavishly rich, playful, and has elegance to spare. Catherine has never been better and becomes even more transfixing and quite honestly, breathtaking, every time I see her. Joyeuses Fêtes.