If you’re like me, and you love to watch Christmas movies around December but are tired of the repeated viewings of chipper films like
White Christmas or
It’s a Wonderful Life, then the French film
A Christmas Tale is the perfect cure to your holiday movie burnout. It’s an upper, too!
It’s about a woman named Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) who is diagnosed with leukemia just before Christmas. Along with her husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), she takes this news with a strangely laid-back attitude and asks their fully grown children for a bone marrow transplant, which has a fifty percent chance of either helping her or killing her. Junon’s children are all in some way mentally and emotionally scarred due to the resentful and cold parentage of Junon, which is linked to a past family tragedy involving the death of Junon’s six-year-old son Joseph, who also died of leukemia in the seventies. There are at least six psychology textbooks worth of emotional baggage a