"A Christmas Tale" is a miraculous gift

You could try to count the miracles of acting and direction that occur in Arnaud Desplechin's instant classic "A Christmas Tale," but it's a pointless exercise — there are simply too many marvels to tally.

Comparisons have been made to Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny & Alexander," and they're lofty but valid, since both films offer vivid portraits of family as real and as complicated as life itself. But where Bergman's turn-of-the-century drama was shot through the prism of autobiographical childhood, Desplechin's gloriously dysfunctional and contemporary clan, the Vuillards, are more like you, me and everyone we know.

Riding high on the unanimous praise that greeted his previous film, 2004's "Kings and Queen," Desplechin has an uncanny knack for creating characters (and bringing them alive through astonishing ensemble performances) who are fully established from the moment we meet them. It's as if Desplechin (with co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu) has already written novels about them, instead of relying on simple backstories invented by his cast. From this starting point of deep, enriching foreknowledge comes a dozen achingly beautiful characters who simultaneously enlighten and baffle us with all-too-human complexity.

We learn much from a silhouette-puppet prologue: Living in the calm, industrial city of Roubaix, the amiable patriarch Abel Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon) and his stylish, emotionally distant wife Junon (Catherine Deneuve) lost their firstborn son to a rare form of leukemia when he was still a child. Now, some three decades later, their three grown-up children are coming for Christmas, aware that Junon has been diagnosed with the same life-threatening cancer. They'll soon learn that two family members — black-sheep son Henri (Mathieu Amalric, in his third film for Desplechin; he's also the latest James Bond villain) and psychologically delicate grandson Paul (Emile Berling) — are compatible donors for the bone-marrow transplant Junon needs for a chance of survival.

Daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) banished Henri from her life six years earlier, for mysterious reasons that resonate throughout the family's various entanglements and estrangements, which also involve youngest son Ivan (Melvil Popaud), his wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's real-life daughter) and cousin Simon (Laurent Cappeluto). Each in their own way, the Vuillards will comfort, coerce and confront each other and themselves, and "A Christmas Tale" evolves into an astonishingly subtle yet richly detailed study of familial disorder in a revealing holiday context.

Desplechin's narrative strategies can be puzzling at first glance, but you don't care because his drama unfolds with a comforting acuity that defies easy analysis. All that really matters is that every moment of "A Christmas Tale" is infused with recognizable humanity, messy by definition and rarely appealing to logic. It's a magical feeling, to enter a film so blessed with perfect casting and directorial skill. A single viewing hardly seems sufficient.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net