La Bûche (1999) - film review

Five days before Christmas, Yvette attends the funeral of her second husband, in the presence of her three daughters, Louba, Sonia and Milla.  Aged 42, Louba is the eldest daughter, single but in a long-term relationship with a married man, Gilbert.  She looks after her elderly father, Stanislas (Yvette’s first husband), in between giving Russian lessons and performing in a Russian cabaret.  An apparent model of bourgeois respectability, Sonia can barely tolerate her broken family, although she is equally susceptible to extra marital flings, usually with very earthy shopkeepers.  Milla, the youngest daughter, is the rebel of the family.  A successful businesswoman, she acts like a man, hates family get-togethers, yet this tough exterior conceals a very fragile interior.  She is attracted to Stanislas’ lodger, Joseph, a melancholic young man who has recently walked away from his wife and young daughter.  As the idealistic Sonia does her best to bring her family together to celebrate a traditional Christmas, their bitter differences drive them further apart…

Having made a career as one of the most successful screenwriters in French cinema, Danièle Thompson finally made the transition to director with La Bûche, an intensely ironic portrait of a wildly dysfunctional family set against a background of false Yuletide merriment.  With an exceptional cast and a script that cleverly contrasts the true face of Christmas (family rows, false expectations, multiple disappointments) with the glitzy commercial sham, La Bûche is both engaging and poignant.  The soundtrack is punctuated with several familiar Christmas numbers (Jingle Bells , White Christmas, etc.), providing an uplifting yet sentimentality-drenched counterpoint to the sober reality of painful individual human experiences during the festive season.

If the film has a fault it is that it fails to make a satisfying cohesive whole.  It has all the ingredients, but somehow what finally comes out of the pudding basin isn’t quite what you might have hoped for. With so many characters and inter-woven subplots, the film ends somewhat untidily, without any real sense of where the drama is going to go next.  Whilst heavy on dialogue, there are some great comic moments (as you would expect from the author of scripts for such films as La Grande vadrouille), although the comedy is very much downplayed, and rightly so.  The film certainly makes a refreshing change to the traditional view of Christmas, as portrayed in most American films, often with irksome superficiality and vomit-inducing sentimentality.

La Bûche’s strongest card is its star-studded cast.  Claude Rich and Charlotte Gainsbourg are particularly noteworthy, both actors bringing great depth and a rather moving sense of irony to their characterisation, portraying two people whose emotional scars are keenly felt by the audience.  Gainsbourg was awarded the Best Supporting Actress César for her part in this film.   Danièle Thompson’s son, Christopher, both co-authored the script and appears in the film in a significant supporting role, showing a promising talent in both areas.

© James Travers 2004


Danièle Thompson made not one but two stunning debuts.  The first one was her screenplay for La Grande vadrouille, directed by her father, Gérard Oury, a film which for many years was the most successful French film at the French box office.  The second was La Bûche, her first film as writer-director.  Keeping up the tradition of family involvement, La Bûche was co-written by her son, Christopher Thompson, who also played a leading role.  Danièle Thompson is in firm command of her material and one is tempted to speculate - given the three leading characters are sisters born of Russian parents but living unhappily in Paris - that Thompson wrote the screenplay with her tongue firmly in her Chekhov.  Whichever way you look at it, this is a brilliant film chock full of great performances, from such talents as Sabine Azéma, Emmanuelle Béart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Claude Rich, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Christopher Thompson and, in a small supporting role as Thompson’s ex-wife, the luminous Isabelle Carré.  Set around Christmas (La Bûche is what we call in England a chocolate log, i.e. a yule log-shaped confection sold in the patisseries in the Christmas season), Thompson’s screenplay delineates to perfection the dysfunctional family, carefully rationing equal measures of laughter and tears.  A stunning debut.

© Leon Nock (London, England) 2010 

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