The 12 Movies of Christmas

A pensive engineer in provincial France ponders the balance of chance and calculation in life, love, and spiritual fulfillment. He realizes on the Solstice that he will marry a young woman he chances upon in a city street after observing her in church, then spends Christmas night in a chaste tryst with a beautiful divorcée to whom he is introduced by an old friend he meets in a fluke, after which he runs across the woman from the church again, having to stay in her extra room when his car is stuck in the snow. The four make up two believers, a Marxist, and a freethinker: MY NIGHT WITH MAUD is a conversational masterpiece (in other words, an Éric Rohmer film) unfolding amid wintry allure, philosophical glamour, and holiday decór.

I suppose it is because the Ibsen play is a serious drama that ends unsentimentally that films of it don’t appear on the seasonal lists I have seen. But it has always had an ironically festive undercurrent, unfolding as it does in a Norwegian town on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after. Losey embraces the holiday ambiance, making a real film of the play, with ice skating, sledding, and sleigh rides; Christmas trees dragged along frosty streets; children opening their gifts; hot chocolate sipped in cafes; and celebratory maskers cavorting. WIth Jane Fonda as Nora, one feminist icon plays another. Any holiday, as a day set apart, holds a potential for change, and Christmas in A DOLL’S HOUSE is a time of personal and social transformation.

Lucho Bender’s FELICIDADES follows several interlinking stories on a Christmas Eve in Buenos Aires, each characterized by chance, misadventure, and a streak of Argentine cynicism. A musician trying to get back to the city from playing a Bar Mitzvah in Rosario finds himself looking for petrol on a dark country road. Three men heading home to their loved ones are impressed as official witnesses by an unsympathetic cop. A holiday date with an attractive new acquaintance (the Spanish star Silke in her luminous heyday) leads to a mishap involving a beloved cat. There’s a bit of tango in a Christmas market and a Southern hemispheric languor to remind those of us in the north that the seasonal appurtenances of the holiday are mere contingencies.

The title of Shakespeare’s play refers, of course, to Epiphany, or the 12th Day of Christmas, the 6th of January, or Three Kings Day, and it was reputedly penned as a entertainment for the holiday. There have been stage productions that dressed the set for Yuletide, such as Mark Rylance’s a few years back, and one by Kenneth Branagh in 1988 that was recorded for TV. Nunn’s is a full film and, notwithstanding that there’s no overt reference to Christmas, it is so spry and celebratory, so imbued with the spirit of storytelling – the mystery of identity and the music of life – that it's hard to imagine a better movie for the occasion.

The holiday creeps up on you in this exquisitely paced procedural from the French master of suspense. A little more than halfway through you realize it’s happening in December, then someone mentions Christmas, and by Christmas Eve, snow is falling like feathers from a burst pillow, bells chime, and the last scene is nigh Dickensian. It’s a murder mystery among the demimonde, with show people, a ne’erdowell producer, a sharp-tongued detective, and an orphan child. I’ve never seen this on a Christmas movie list, even international ones, and can’t imagine why.

A technicolor melodrama in which an affluent widow (Jane Wyman) and her gardener turned tree farmer (Rock Hudson) endure class disapproval for their town-country romance. It sounds like he’s growing Christmas trees, and, indeed, fall turns to winter, and the holiday approaches, and there he is selling them (not his own, he explains, but helping a friend). Christmas, it turns out, is the turning point. The gift of a television (still a novelty then) from her disapproving son causes Wyman to confront her situation: she stares at herself reflected in the screen, become the subject of a soap opera. The whole thing is a send-up, in color, of the grey Eisenhower era with its oppressive sex roles and gender stereotypes. There are surprising streaks of feminism, like scratches in window frost, and a certain campiness in how Wyman and Hudson relate to each other. It’s impossible not to smile, these many years later, when she asks him, in a serious talk between lovers: “Do you want me to be a man?” And he claims not.

Kenneth Branagh directs but does not act in A MIDWINTER’S TALE, which in the U.K. was called (in a bow to the classic carol) IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER. A struggling actor-director obtains money through his agent (played by the always divaesque Joan Collins) for a Christmas Eve production of “Hamlet” in a drafty unused church in a provincial English town, conceived as a rallying cry against development. The church is stage, rehearsal space, and lodge for the cast, a mix of ego, pretension, and mercurialism perennial in the theater. All does not go without hitch. Although not very Christmasy, if truth be told, it adds up to a playful diversion, not without substance or surprise.

Radu Muntean’s TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS is a Christmas drama from Romania that is life-affirming and emotionally painful in equal measure. It opens with a rapturously unselfconscious post-coital nude scene that reveals itself only gradually to be between not spouses nor single lovers but an infidelitous husband and his mistress. Truth may will out as the holiday nears, but there is a child in the mix, and as the sad embittered spouses look toward what could be the end of a marriage, one is not so sure, as the family celebrates, what the Tuesday after will actually bring.

Todd Haynes' CAROL might have been called “The Price of Salt,” the original title of the Patricia Highsmith novel, but using the alternate title highlights both the character played by Cate Blanchett and that of the movie itself. Haynes is a master refurbisher of genres (FAR FROM HEAVEN was Sirkian melodrama made new), and he and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy have recast the novel as “Christmas movie.” The genre is remade; the conventions serve the film, not, as is so often, the reverse. It is the 1950s. Rooney Mara’s Therese, a “shop girl” in a Santa cap hired for Christmas, falls for the plush, affluent Carol, married and a mother in the suburbs. Christmas and the New Year (tradition followed by change) are mood and catalyst for Therese’s discovering her identity and Carol’s marriage coming to a head (more than a little in the film is owed to Ibsen’s DOLL’S HOUSE). The acting, at the core of the self and its mysteries, is great as it gets; the grey ’50s ambiance is ironically nostalgic; the holiday liminal and transforming.

8 WOMEN is an eccentric 2002 movie musical with a classic whodunnit plot - guests holed up in a house with a body, everyone wondering which of them did it. It’s Christmas time at the family estate, cottonball snowflakes pile up outside, the hall is decked, and now and then someone sings or dances. The eight suspects are a near honor roll of French women of the cinema - Deneuve, Huppert, Ardant, Béart, Leydoyen, Darrieux, Richards, Sagnier – especially her, Ludivine Sagnier, as the youngest of the house. She is the first to burst into song and the one who, a la Marple or Poirot (only she is dressed in Christmas green, like an elf) assembles the women to hear the solution to the mystery, or, as she puts it, the “Christmas story.” It is based on a 1958 play by Robert Thomas, a so-called “comedy thriller,” which one would rather like to see sometime.

Shakespeare’s "Winter's Tale" is faintly mirrored – and indeed makes an appearance – in this tale of chance, misadventure, and the risk of fate. Félicie has a summer affair but, prone to mixing up words (she is always being corrected), she gives him a wrong address, on top of which she knows him only as Charles, never getting a last name, and he is off working someplace in “America,” whether North or South she isn’t sure. A child results, and so the tale is also one of a little girl separated from her father, with only a photo to know him by. It is Christmas time, and Félicie – Charlotte Véry is perfect in the part – balances two lovers, leaving one for the other and back again, at least halfway, all during the holidays. It is not mere fickleness, but a Pascalian gamble she unconsciously takes that, unlikely as Charles reappearing is, the reward would be so great that she can love no other in the “right way,” at least for now.

I end this cinematic carol with perhaps the most haunting gift of all. Godard is doubtless secular—so am I for the most part—but this is as spiritually searching a retelling of “the Christmas story” as I can imagine (it doesn’t even deny the non-scientific claim at the story's center). I think Pauline Kael referred once, in her writings on Godard, to “the pull of his images.” The sensation of being drawn along by a succession of frames is acutely beautiful here, the difficulty of belief colliding in their interstices with the possibility of wonder.