A Christmas Tale

This comic, ultimately touching family melodrama is a heady plum pudding of a movie — studded with outsized performances and drenched in cinematic brio. The narrative pattern seems to extend every which way at once as Arnaud Desplechin brings the Vuillard clan back to their parental home in Roubaix, a small city on the Belgian border. The gathering is prompted by the season and by the discovery that the family’s chic and imperious matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. The family’s first-born son, Joseph, died of the same cancer at age 6. His sister, Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), remains traumatized, as does her younger brother, Henri (Desplechin regular Mathieu Amalric, in another madcap performance), who was conceived in the hopes that he’d prove to be a compatible bone-marrow donor for his doomed sibling. Desplechin thrives on drunken escapades, medical procedures, blunt confessions, grand gestures, and screwball riffs. Not unlike this movie, the Vuillard home is crammed with stuff, including a dollhouse model of itself. The place is a kind of theater, consecrated to the universal, atavistic belief that the dead return to their families at the new year season.