By Ray Pride

Andre Desplechin’s hilarious, bravura, restlessly generous dark comedy, “A Christmas Tale,” is of a piece with earlier work like the furiously engaged mega-talkathon “My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument” (1996) and the jaw-dropping “Kings and Queen” (2005), which led me to write that “Sometimes too much is simply too much and other times, too much is bliss.” Of the same movie, critic Kent Jones wrote, “Arnaud Desplechin is a protean, mercurial, supremely gifted filmmaker in a depressingly linear and single-minded age. His generous, super-abundant films look and feel like no one else’s—by contrast, almost everything else seems a little careful and self-contained.” Those words hold true still.

The French writer-director’s latest finds a splintered family coming together at Christmas because mother Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has fallen ill with leukemia, which had killed her eldest son. Father Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) rounds up their three grown children: Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a miserable playwright married to a mathematician (Hippolyte Girardot) and a troubled teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling); Henri (Mathieu Amalric), who was banished from the family by his sister several years earlier, and the conciliatory younger brother Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), who brings along Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni) and has two quirky sons. Family members are tested to see if they’re possible donors, leading to the family whirl, which includes Henri’s girlfriend, Faunia, played by Desplechin regular, the brilliant Emmanuelle Devos. Christmas, and family, and battle, ensue.

“A Christmas Tale” is the “home for the holidays” primal scene as primal scream: from the first moments, as we’re introduced to the characters, we realize they can be chilly and abrupt, capable of pettiness and outright cruelty. And that’s just the set-up. Individual scenes and transgressions and bouts of grief that unfold in the family home have led Desplechin to compare the house and the film to an Advent calendar, or a Joseph Cornell box, little corners filled with treats and tricks at every turn. When I suggest it’s also like a dollhouse, like a spiteful child would furiously demolish, he quickly agrees with a burst of generous laughter.

Desplechin likes to quote an observation that movies need to have four ideas each minute. “I think what Truffaut was saying was not a big philosophical concept. It could be very silly ideas. It could be small ideas. Very subtle things, which suddenly pop up in the middle of the movie. There are great directors who have deep, profound ideas for twenty minutes. I’m thinking of Tarkovsky, and I have great admiration for him but I wouldn’t be able to film that way. When Truffaut was giving this line, I think he was thinking about details, making storytelling a bit faster, a bit funnier.” Like putting a poster in the corner, or a funny hat, a piece of music coming from a car? “Yeah. Very practical things, like an odd way of answering a question. Or a surprising reaction or that everything is expressed by a gesture. Or something a character has in his pocket.”

The eight features he’s made are fraught with telling detail, from composition to décor to music to dialogue to behavior, but he’s not concerned that you can take it all in, or have to get the implications of using cut-out animation to tell bits of backstory, done after the style of American artist Kara Walker, whose own cut-out work has depicted tableaux from the violent history of slavery. Letters often play in Desplechin’s films, but the characters’ communication always seems epistolary in another way, as if communication were only possible where no silence can live. “I think the way Americans use language is fascinating,” he tells me, warming to the subject. “The comedies, of the thirties or forties, the sheer pleasure of exchanging words. But we are, each time I like the way the character are not speaking like in natural life. The sound of it, the sound of the dialogue. I would love to be able to write dialogues which are [simply] beautiful. Which means that even if someone young sees it on TV or on DVD and let’s say that she is 12 or he is 12, would get the mood of it even if she cannot understand each word. The mood of it, or the way of acting those words, y’know, it would be just like breathing. I love when the father is reading Nietzsche lines to his daughter [in the film]. He wants to comfort her but he does not know the words. He doesn’t know what to say. So he’s picking up a book and reading the lines. Period. I love the fact that with the lines, the sounds fades, and you just have the music. And silence. After that you can have the words again, but what it means is that to listen to the words, the meaning, to listen to the music is largely enough. So perhaps, it’s because it’s close to my own way of looking at films. I am looking at the film [and] I am 12. I am not listening to all the words, I am just listening to the music of it.”

Hitchcock liked to say that audiences didn’t want a slice of life, they wanted a slice of cake. “Cake, yeah,” the 48-year-old writer-director says with his ready laugh. “Oh yeah. I certainly agree.” “A Christmas Tale” builds on that, I joke, it’s an entire patisserie. His laughter is almost as gratifying as his tremendously touching rumpus of a movie. Almost. But not quite.

“A Christmas Tale” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Milestone Films, one of the most important distributors of gone-missing films from international film heritage, including “Killer of Sheep” and “I Am Cuba,” releases Kent McKenzie’s “The Exiles,” presented by Charles Burnett and Sherman Alexie, a restoration of an almost-unseen 1961 fiction film in film-noir tradition, the story of Native Americans in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill District as they struggle during the Bureau of Indian Affairs “relocation period.” Glistening with bright light and darkening sorrow, the no-budget “Exiles,” indie decades before the slapdash label was applied to many an undernourished project, and a narrative based on extensive documentary research, plays out as a day in the life of several native Americans in their twenties who have left the reservation for the big city, and the result is mood and moment, anthropology and melancholy. The sound design is unusually strong and the general enterprise bears comparison to the early work of Cassavetes, as many reviewers have noted. 72m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

A tale of revenge and grief, “The First Breath of Tengan Rei,” shot predominantly on Chicago’s South Side, begins midstream with an abduction of a teenage boy, Paris (Katori Eason), the kidnapper young Okinawan woman Tengan Rei, played by Erika Oda. She’s in over her head, her handgun far too big for her—no matter how well the boy’s tied up, we know she’s not a professional. Paris’ father Nelson (Sean Nix), a U.S. Marine who spent time in prison for raping Rei when she was a girl, longs for his missing son, who was taken in an act of vengeance. This can only end one way. Written, directed and produced by husband-and-wife team Ed M. Koziarski and Junko Kajino, “Tengan Rei” explores themes of forgiveness, redemption and the sometimes terrible results of occupation, and the film benefits from persuasive writing and skilled editing that moves you, in snippets, back and forth from past to present. Some horrors most of us will, luckily, never know, and desperation, the bond that unites all of these characters, is a global affliction. (Tom Lynch)

RECOMMENDED

Like “JCVD,” “Bolt” opens with an outlandish action sequence. Spoiler alert: it’s not real. Just a shoot for an episode of a hit TV series starring the title dog (voiced, barked, yelped and whimpered by John Travolta) that thinks it’s all for real. Every week Bolt rescues his plucky owner Penny (Miley Cyrus aka “Hannah Montana”) from evildoers. Like “The Truman Show,” the TV show “Bolt” is shot with hidden cameras. Real-time special effects trick Bolt into believing he really does possess all his super-powers in the script. “If the dog believes it, the audience believes it,” states TV director (voiced by windbag James Lipton from “Inside the Actor’s Studio”). The target demographic wants new plots: “They’re not happy with happy,” reports a network exec. Bolt bolts and gets shipped by a mishap to New York City. He meets sassy kitty Mittens (Susie Essman) and heads back to Hollywood. She brings Bolt up to speed on his life-long delusion, as well as coaching him on how to stick his head out the window of a moving vehicle. A high-strung hamster and super-fan (voiced by Mark Walton) joins the journey. Like the movie-star dog in “Firehouse Dog,” the star of “Bolt” will rescue people in real peril. Directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard, and writers Dan Fogelman and Chris Williams unleash a treat for dog-lovers and haters of L.A. agents and network execs. Walt Disney Animation Studios superbly reproduces behavioral details of puppies and pigeons. But this Digital 3-D feature is needlessly 3-D. The only delight it brought me was second-hand: hearing the squeals of delight when the opening credits startled kids in the audience. With Greg Germann, Malcolm McDowell, Diedrich Bader, Grey DeLisle and Sean Donnellan. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

Newcity’s Best of Chicago was published this week. Here are the film-related entries:

Best Chicago-as-Gotham moment in “The Dark Knight”

Best name other than “Nothing Like the Holidays” for renaming the movie once known as “Humboldt Park”

Best next foe for the rival film critic who smacked Roger Ebert at a screening

By Ray Pride

While an Indian friend of Danny Boyle’s tells the director that his “Slumdog Millionaire” won’t be melodramatic enough for audiences on the Subcontinent, its bustling commotion is a fine, generous surprise in this movie year, bristling with romantic notions about love and destiny. It’s a great entertainment, with some of the basic satisfactions of a movie like “Titanic,” in its idealistic, quixotic telling and in the script’s studious prefigurings and refigurings.

Working from a script by Simon Beaufoy, whose credits include “The Full Monty,” Boyle, shooting in HD on practical locations, makes a seamless weave of present and past in the story of an unlikely contestant, an uneducated 18-year-old orphan, on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” “Slumdog Millionaire” is Dickensian in the true sense of the word, filled with poverty and hope, color and conflict, like an “Oliver Twist” scored to M.I.A. (The rich score is by A. R. Rahman, Bollywood’s leading composure, with Maya Arulpragasam’s “Paper Planes” filling the scene at just the right moment.)

The last time I talked to Boyle, I’d only just read about the “Slumdog” project the night before, weeks before he began shooting, and the idea of his working from a Beaufoy script with digital cameras hurtling through the back-alleys of Mumbai sounded propulsive with potential, and I’d told him so. “It’s funny, innit?” he says in his rapid Scots burr, laughing on the morning of his fifty-second birthday. “I’d love to replay that now, if I could see myself talking about it. ‘Cos it’s weird, you go off and make these things. You’ve talked about them before. Luckily, this weird amnesia sets in about things. You do all these interviews and it does make you very self-conscious about stuff, about why you’re doing stuff, in a way that you never think about normally. And yet clearly, you forget it. Because, when you come to make a film? I never think about what I’ve said to anybody about it. Some amnesiac drug sets in whereby you forget the self-consciousness and you go off on this trip of making a film.”

We still haven’t sat down. “Often when I talk to journalists, I sound coherent! You don’t think in that coherent way when you’re doing things; you make sense of them afterwards, don’t you? Patterns emerge about what sounds interesting and attractive. Some of it’s true and some of it is a bit of a fabrication, but basically you work out this way of talking about it, but it isn’t necessarily the way you’ve made the film at all. But fortunately the two are separate in a way. They don’t… My biggest worry, I’ve just been in Austin, where they gave me this award. I’m terrified of things like that, people start talking—”

Is it over, is that what you’re thinking? “They start talking about the ooov-rah, y’know, about the connective tissue of the films.” Boyle cuts a huge grin. “Fuck! It’s like… ahhhh! But fortunately, it all seems to kind of blur away. You have amnesia when you read a script as well. People have been asking about the script and my line on it, which is true, after about ten or fifteen pages, I knew I was going to make it, even though the prospect of reading it hadn’t been particularly attractive. I’ve been saying, the best way to make the decisions is in the middle, not by the time you get to the end. It’s because you have amnesia when you’re reading a script, of actually what problems you’re going to face making it. You forget the realities of filmmaking, money and stars and studios and distribution and locations.” He lets out his boisterous laugh. “You just forget all that, you just think, ‘Awww, this is fantastic! Wouldn’t this be great?’ And then you get on with it. That’s the amnesia thing that helps you. It’s like they say about women having children. They say hormones are released in women that makes them forget the pain. Otherwise women would only ever have one child! Otherwise no one would be insane enough to go back to that level of suffering!”

Now we take a seat. He remembers I asked about the shooting. “Gather round, gather round. So we’re in the slums. We get a couple of little shacks to have the equipment in and it’s full, these rooms would be full of dry ice. This weird image! The hard drive, the Apple notebook that’s on the cameraman’s back was a MacBook Pro. It’s in a suitcase surrounded with dry ice to keep it cool. Not just because of the temperature of India, which, y’know, adds to it. But because they overheat. That’s one of the biggest technical problems we had with it. So you’d have this weird image full of dry ice, like some kind of rock concert! All these assistants handling dry ice with the special gloves or with tweezers. We’d have three or four of these cameras, and they’d be re-supplying them with dry ice. So that’s high-definition filming in the streets of Mumbai!”

“Slumdog Millionaire” is now playing.

RECOMMENDED

With the availability of inexpensive equipment, younger filmmakers have been looking for a way around the old ways of getting films seen. When Columbia, Missouri-based Todd Sklar’s self-distributed “Box Elder” played Siskel this spring, I nominated it to be the first “mumblebumstumblecore” comedy, a variation on both “Slacker” and Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travel.” A cockeyed caravan of post-collegiate misbehaviors, it promises much for future endeavors, and plays again Thursday November 13, with Sklar and and actors Alex Rennie, Brian Sturgill and James Ponsoldt appearing. The current endeavor, entitled “Slacker Bliss!” by Siskel, is a DIY tour by bus that’s hitting cities across the country, with three more titles. Christopher Jaymes’ “In Memory of My Father” stars Eric Michael Cole, Judy Greer and Matt Keeslar in a comedy about a movie mogul’s deathbed becoming the center of rapacious behavior for all concerned. Jaymes and Jeremy Sisto will appear Friday. JJ Lask’s “On the Road with Judas” stars Aaron Ruell and Kevin Corrigan in a multifaceted road movie; Lask and Corrigan will appear Saturday. And on Sunday, Robert Byington’s “RSO,” aka “Registered Sex Offender,” is a bracing black comedy, the central character of which is a just-paroled sex offender who may just be beyond redemption. It’s a fecund jaw-dropper, with roles for directors Andrew Bujalski, Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi. Byington and actors Kristen Tucker and Kevin Corrigan will appear. DIY not? (Ray Pride)

Details at siskelfilmcenter.com.

RECOMMENDED

In the twenty-second film in the James Bond franchise, Daniel Craig continues to kidnap the 007 persona as he did in the prior Bond film, “Casino Royale” (2006). Bond began to bore long ago, but Craig’s grey, weathered, oily mug has hijacked this tacky franchise. With a face to match his name, Craig offers a more thoughtful, noir-scarred action character. (And “James Bond Will Return,” promises an end title card.) Just as Batman benefited from deeper and darker readings, Bond can do more than his mythology dictates. Gadgets and go-go models are underplayed this time, although one woman is dressed only in black oil, recalling a gold-painted victim from earlier Bondage. Writers Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade plot the usual conspiracy that threatens the Earth. The detail about the natural resource that’s leveraged for intrigue in “Quantum of Solace” is tapped from the new political economy of privatized utilities. Director Marc Forster (”The Kite Runner,” “Stranger Than Fiction,” “Monster’s Ball”) honors action formula without art-film inflection. More telling may be the casting of French actor Mathieu Amalric (”A Christmas Tale”) as Bond’s nemesis and Olga Kurylenko (”Max Payne”) as Bond’s comrade in arms. And the chase scenes are quite cool. With Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Gemma Arterton, Giancarlo Giannini. Jesper Christensen, Anatole Taubman, Rory Kinnear and Tim Pigott-Smith. 105m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

Vampire stories have been told on screen for so long now, the creativity has thinned dramatically, and now we get hollow geysers based in gore (”30 Days of Night”) or hammy, overtly allegorical creations like HBO’s “True Blood.” Consider the relief, then, when a nuanced, even subtle, vampire picture finds its way to the screen. You know the film has a separate set of priorities when the scariest moment doubles as its sweetest, when one child asks another, without fear or judgment, only a remote apprehension in the worry of hurting feelings, “Are you a vampire?” Tomas Alfredson’s tale of a bullied 12-year-old Swedish boy, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and his unexpected friendship with a female peer who feeds on human blood, Eli (Lina Leandersson), is more of an adolescent love story than anything else, horror with a longing heart. John Ajvide Lindqvist adapts his own novel and uses a fair amount of common vampire mythology, the most compelling of which is the notion that you must first invite a vampire into your house before it can enter (the title has a nice double-meaning). Hoyte Van Hoytema uses Sweden’s snowy landscapes in much of his compositions to display a romantic creepiness that’s compounded by the film’s patient pace and eerie quietness—snowfall keeps the volume down. A scene of regrettable CGI distracts, but it’s mostly forgotten with the film’s brutal, possibly unfair comeuppance, and a stunning final scene of choice, of love, of protection. Another teen-vamp romance hits screens this year, “Twilight,” but it’s unlikely that film will feature an image as memorable as Eli’s giant green eyes. Children are fragile, even if they’re undead. 114m. (Tom Lynch)

Jean-Claude Van Damme opens this hybrid action-art film by making his way down a long alley bristling with bad guys. Bones shatter, fireballs blossom. The prolonged shot is standard Van Damme mayhem. There’s a small measure of parody, which can be hard to gauge in a genre driven by over-the-top excess. Then we hear “cut,” see a camera crew, and notice an insolent “Asian Director” tossing darts at a board with the Hollywood sign. What sort of iconoclasm French director and co-writer Mabrouk El Mechri means is unclear. Playing himself in some senses, Van Damme (”Bloodsport,” “Universal Soldier,” “The Order”) gets a vanity turn in vulnerability. Here he’s a 47-year-old action star on the skids. His last check to his L.A. lawyer bounced, and he risks losing custody of his daughter in divorce proceedings. Back in his hometown of Brussels, Van Damme enters a neighborhood bank where robbers take him hostage. A media frenzy jams nearby streets. Van Damme gets an improbable prison term—and starts teaching karate to inmates—though it’s unlikely this role will break him out of his typecasting. Yet, his world-weary mien and a drama workshop-style monologue do suggest he can do more than kick and squint. 96m. (Bill Stamets)