A Christmas Tale / Leave it to the French to make a truly ugly, real and touching yuletide drama. American cinema will still decorate family holiday reunion gatherings with the trappings of holly and harmless Vaughn/Witherspoon quirk, but A Christmas Tale is a film about a family made up of extremely flawed individuals whose unapologetic, unappealing traits aren’t diluted or dumbed down. The fact that one still cares and manages to be touched by these people is the story’s key strength.

Junon discovers she has leukemia and her only chance for survival is a bone marrow transplant. Played with a cold, yet bemused aloofness by the regal Catherine Deneuve, Junon takes this news with a certain detachment. Her husband practically has to force her to go for the transplant procedure. Her bitter writer daughter Elizabeth “banished” her boozy, irresponsible son Henri after bailing him out of a financial screw-up one last time. Instead of going for broad laughs, Mathieu Amalric makes the alcoholic, hedonist Henri not a bumbling cliché, but a sour, drolly comic slimeball—why wasn’t he allowed to be that creative with his smarmy part as a Bond villain in Quantum of Solace? Her other son Ivan goes with the flow so amiably, he’s practically passive-aggressive. One of these siblings, or their own children, is a compatible match for her medical procedure. Thus, they get together for the holidays and with their spouses, lovers, offspring and a cousin who they treat like a fourth child, loud, bickering drama ensues.

What makes A Christmas Tale so fascinating is its denseness. It’s practically a book come to life on screen, a book that would be at least 600 pages. So much back story and character development is packed into the two and a half hour runtime that, at times, the film is overwhelming with detail. Dissolves are artfully accomplished with a black peephole closing in on and focusing on the scene’s end, giving the feel of chapter conclusions.

The archetypes: black sheep prodigal son, dying mother and psychologically unbalanced grandson; they are all there, but the nuances and time devoted to each one makes them feel fresh and remarkable. Various characters address the screen with first person monologues of exposition and personal admissions. Even Henri’s girlfriend is given the space to grow. A lesser movie would have used her as slutty comic relief, or even mocked her for laughs, but she ends up becoming a key part of the family dynamic. There’s a scene where she runs into Junon by chance at a museum and the awkward pair end up shopping together; and though there is preoccupied humor in the scene, it’s still organic enough to feel essential in the screenplay’s desire for us to learn more about these people.

It is this difficult, complex, challenging prose-like richness that one becomes grateful for. Extended family holiday movies just aren’t supposed to be this literary. Releasing A Christmas Tale in March is one of the downfalls of indie cinema in Hawaii. Still, it’s not the holiday that matters for this film; it’s just an occasion for these damaged, but poignantly recognizable figures to get together and tell us their tale.

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