Just as Bach’s set of preludes and fugues encompasses a number of styles, A Christmas Tale delivers a fair amount of dark comedy mixed with well tempered melodrama in the highly literate story of a French family gathering for the holidays. There are two foils to the reunion: one is that the matriarch Junon (Denueve) is in need of a bone marrow transplant and the other is that the two potential donors are her disowned son Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and her disturbed grandson Paul. Each of the characters, not just the aforementioned, is just a little out there… well, except for Henri, whose persona as the family black sheep is way out. (He’s the clavier). We know that he was banished from the family by his sister Elizabeth, a depressed playwright and Paul’s mother, yet the reasons are never made quite clear, so the film becomes a mystery of sorts that’s never satisfactorily resolved. Meanwhile we catch glimpses of the entire family’s dysfunction – Henri & Elizabeth’s good-natured younger brother Ivan, his devoted wife Sylvia, and their two little boys; the sedate paterfamilias Abel, the lovelorn cousin Simon, and Elizabeth’s skittish husband Claude. Over the course of the days leading up to Christmas they carry on in all manner of feckless behavior ranging from bickering and adultery to statistical analysis rendered on a chalkboard. The directorial technique is unusual for this type of film, including the use of split screens, irises to bridge scenes, and breaking the fourth wall, the latter of which is used to good effect, i.e sparingly and skillfully performed. Ultimately it’s the performances that make this an unexpected but decent film about an unlikely but likable gang of kooks. From them we learn about the pain of isolation and that blood is thicker than personal animosity.