Rachel's Christmas Wedding Tale (Reviews, sort of)

I've been promising this for a whole, and better do it - the holidays are coming fast (with the Oshima series in town, they're already here! that's pretty much my schedule for the next week...), and time is getting short... So, as noted in my Synecdoche NY post, there have been some interesting films this fall - here are a couple in particular I liked, a bit more than the Kaufman film... Namely, Rachel Getting Married and A Christmas Tale. [I noticed: there are spoilers below - I don't know if these films are still creeping around the country - they might be, and I imagine lots of people will only get the chance to see them on DVD; I'm not sure there's any way around this, though, not for me - I'm not much of a reviewer: I want to talk about their stories and story telling, and I am pretty sure that requires talking about some things that are revealed over time in the films - I don't know if I'd call them surprises, but, the revelation is part of the way the stories are told... so... be warned, I guess.]

These two films go together rather well - in both, a black sheep character turns up at a family gathering and raises hell - reopening old wounds and restarting old fights, by acting like a jerk, etc. Some resolutions are reached, though that isn't quite the point (Rachel ties everything up much neater than the Desplechin film - the dead child is her fault, the characters sort of work through things to something like peace, etc. - none of which happens, exactly, in A Christmas Tale)... The biggest differences are in the style - Demme adopts a cinema verite style, handheld camera, prowling about, the loose scripting and acting, and so on; and in the near total focus on the main character. Desplechin adopts more or less every style known to film, theater television and arts undiscovered, and hops around all over the place. That's where the main difference lies, though - in who the film follows.

Rachel Getting Married sticks pretty close to Anne Hathaway's Kym. The film follows her through the weekend, and gives what she sees. (This is one reason the criticism of the film for presenting a racial paradise are a bit off - everything we see, we see through Kym, and her personality - her solipsism, her own capacity for stirring up drama wherever she goes, tends to blot out other issues and contentions. Whatever racial tensions there might be at this wedding, we aren't going to see, because all we see is centered on Kym. Now this focus is, I think, both a strength and a weakness. One thing I like about it is that it runs counter to films like Synecdoche NY (with its self-pitying, self-destructive male lead character) - it's centered on a disruptive, not all sympathetic woman - a female anti-hero. This is rare - I am not sure how rare, but it is rare enough that it feels far less predictable (even when things are running pretty much to form) than the Kaufman film. Obnoxious guys are a dime a dozen; obnoxious (but charismatic) women are a bit of a novelty. It's enough, buy itself, to make a middle of the pack story seem a bit more important. The politics matters. The structural style - attaching the narrative point of view very closely to a character, like this, tends to run with that kind of character - whether the film filters the world through the character's eyes (as in most Kaufman films), or structures what it shows around the character, as in Rachel, it depends on the limited POV and the attitude of the character....

Which helps show what makes Arnaud Desplechin such a marvellous filmmaker. A Christmas Tale also features a disruptive character - like Synecdoche, a middle aged man, an artist - but unlike either of the American films, Desplechins does not stay there. The style, of course, is all over the place - there are handheld scenes, with plenty of camera prowling, but also plenty of more carefully composed shots, plenty of interruptions - Desplechin never lets things get too documentary like. You get direct addresses - sometimes to the camera, sometimes to a kind of implied audience, you get inserted speeches, you get puppet plays, you get diegetically inserted plays - you get the danmed works.

But it's the story telling that makes this such a delight. Desplechin does structure the story around Henri (Matthieu Amalric's madman) - his coming and going is where the film starts and stops. (It starts, in cold fact,with his birth, which coincides with the fatal illness of the missing brother; the action of the film proper is set up by his mother's illness, but really starts with his arrival at the house - everything else had been preparing for that, and of course he is linked as explicitly as such figures get, to her disease.) But Desplechin never gives the film completely to Henri - it constantly spins away from him, and not just toreturn. but it spends a great deal of time elsewhere. Most of the other characters get moments alone, with nothing to do with Henri; Elizabeth, Paul, Faunia all take over the narrative for stretches of time - and then, probably oddest of all, the last third is dominated by the story of Sylvia and Simon, a story line that has next to nothing to do with the main plot line (Junon's illness, Henri's place in the family) - it has nothing to do with Henri or Junon at all. Deplechins in always an adventurous story teller: he sometimes follows a single character, sometimes concentrates on one character over others, but sometimes, of course, heads off in all directions. Kings and Queen, say, among its many virtues, has this - a narrative divided between a man and woman who are no longer a couple, and not going to become a couple ever again. That is very strange: it is not about a breakup, it is not about forming a couple - it is about 2 people who were a couple, who have ties even now - but who are now living their separate lives, and are going to continue to live them. But the film follows both of them, as if both of them matter - how strange!

Anyway - A Christmas Tale is a marvel indeed. And Rachel Getting Married is no slouch. They are both far more satisfying that Synecdoche NY - just as ambitious and smart, and really a good deal less conventional. Rachel probably benefits as much from who it follows as from the material itself (and from the performances and Demme's direction, yes...); A Christmas Tale earns it on the merits. They've been bit of bright spot in what feels like a fairly dul year, so far... Though there havebeen other good films - if I were more ambitious I might poke into a couple of the other films I've liked this fall - Ballast was pretty inspiring as well. It's another film that seems to follow a fairly conventional pattern, but glides in different directions than you expect. Characters seem to be one thing and aren't - Lawrence particularly; scenes seem to be heading in one direction, but swerve... and - true to Lance Hammer's debt to the Dardennes brothers - the kind of film where heading off to work is made to seem heroic... as for the best (new) film I've seen this year - The Headless Woman - that I have to see it again to say anything coherent about it....