brightwalldarkroom: “For an outsider, Christmas feels more like fairytale than religious oblig
brightwalldarkroom: “For an outsider, Christmas feels more like fairytale than religious obligation. It places the observant at the center of a children’s story in setting and in mindset—liberation from the laws of nature and reason, transformation of physical dimensions (a tree in the house, a man down the chimney) and spiritual entities (a god becomes a man). The holiday’s first requirement, then, is a suspension of skepticism. Its mythos gains purchase by its miracles, suggesting that wonder is the seductive path to belief. Armed with this knowledge, Arnaud Desplechin begins his A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) with the opening bars of Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture,” a fittingly allusive score. For Desplechin’s film is Romantic and Shakespearean and unifies a multiplicity of plotlines and temperaments, fantastic and earthly, classical and contemporary, through enchantment. Even as the director chapters his film according to the holiday’s religious obligations, he makes Christmas a conceit. Like beginning a tale with “Once upon a time…”, setting a film at Christmas bestows a liberation from mundanity.” —Karina Wolf, on A Christmas Tale -- source link
#arnaud desplechin#catherine deneuve#mathieu amalric#chiara mastroianni