A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin is the son of Robert and Mado Desplechin, and grew up in the Nord department. He has a brother named Fabrice who has acted in several of his films, and two sisters: novelist Marie Desplechin and screenwriter Raphaëlle Desplechin.

Arnaud Desplechin studied film directing at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, graduating in 1984. He made three short films inpsired by the work of the Belgian novelist Jean Ray, and became a great admirer of the films of Alain Resnais. During the late 1980s, Desplechin worked as a director of photography on several films.

In 1990, Desplechin directed La Vie des morts, starring several actors who would go on to appear in multiple Desplechin films, such as Marianne Dénicourt, Emmanuelle Devos, Emmanuel Salinger and Thibault de Montalembert. The 54-minute-long film won the Jean Vigo Prize for Short Films, and was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Desplechin’s first feature-length movie, La Sentinelle, premiered in 1992, starring several actors from La vie des morts as well as Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, and Lászlo Szabó, who have also become frequent Desplechin collaborators. Desplechin’s 1996 film Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle) was a critical success and established Desplechin as an important director for the 1990s. Some journalists talk about the “Desplechin generation” to describe this era of French cinema.

In 2000, Desplechin made his first English-language film, Esther Kahn, adapted from a novel by Arthur Symons. It starred Summer Phoenix in the title role, as a Jewish-English girl. The film was seen as a homage to François Truffaut’s work because it deals with coming of age (a favorite Truffaut theme) and uses the New Wave cinema techniques that Truffaut pioneered.

Three years later, Desplechin made two films adapting Edward Bond’s play In the Company of Men: one showing 70% rehearsal footage and 30% of the film itself; and the other with inverse proportions. The next year, he directed Kings and Queen, which mixed comedy and tragedy to tell the story of two ex-lovers played by Amalric and Devos. The film also starred Catherine Deneuve in the role of a psychiatrist. Kings and Queen was nominated for several awards and Amalric won the César Award for Best Actor. However, controversy arose when Marianne Denicourt, Desplechin’s ex-girlfriend, accused him of revealing elements of her private life in the screenplay of Kings and Queen. In 2005, she published Mauvais génie (“Evil Genius”), describing her relationship with an unscrupulous film director called “Arnold Duplancher.” She sued Desplechin and won 200,000 euros in 2006.

In 2007, Desplechin filmed L’Aimée, a documentary showing his father, his brother, and his nephews in the family house in Roubaix just before it was to be sold. That same year, he filmed the family drama Un conte de Noël, starring Deneuve, Amalric, Devos, and Mastroianni. This film was screened in competition at Cannes in 2008.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaud_Desplechin)