03/12/2008

"I cast Catherine Deneuve because she's the best French actress, and the most bodacious".

Arnaud Desplechin smiles as he says this about the French diva per excellence, who walked away with the Special Prize last May at the Cannes Film Festival, where the 48-year-old director's film starring Deneuve, A Christmas Tale [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], was shown in competition.

It happens to be the perfect definition for her character Junon. A mother with very little maternal about her, on the waiting list for a bone marrow transplant, she has to come to terms with her very diverse family members on Christmas Eve (read our report from Cannes).

"I didn't have her in mind while I was writing the screenplay", Desplechin explains in a meeting with Cineuropa at the French Embassy in Rome, "but when I offered her the part she was fascinated by the romantic involvement with Jean-Paul Roussillon, considering that her husbands in her most recent films were not right for her at all!"
BIM is launching A Christmas Tale on 40 screens on December 5th, right in the middle of that holiday season whose myth the film sets out to debunk. "Okay, it's true, I was brought up Catholic, and when I write I think about what religion my characters belong to, whether they're Catholic or Jewish. I was looking at how kitschy Christmas is, with all that generosity that comes out for the occasion, which I find simply unbearable".

The character who stands out in this film is one of Junon's children, Henri, played by Mathieu Almaric, an actor who is finally having his day after The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] e Quantum of Solace [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile]. "I've known Mathieu for a while; we belong to the same generation. When I asked him to play Paul Dédalus in my film My Sex Life…or How I Got Into an Argument in 1996, I told him: 'Think it over, because if you take the part your whole life will change.' And I was right."

(Translated from Italian)