Dropping in on Yuletide Paris, I was not all that charmed the 1999 "La Bûche" ("bûche" means log and there are Christmas cakes "bûches de Nöel," but I don't understand the relevance of the title). According to the importer, "If you liked "Home for Holidays," then La Buche should be added to your list of movies to see. In this lightweight French comedy from screenwriter-turned-director Daniele Thompson, three daughters scheme to reunite their parents, who divorced 25 years ago and haven't spoken to each other since. It's a Christmas dinner that will give every person from a dysfunctional family a nod of acknowledgement and many laughs."


Other than having strained relationships like those of the characters in "Home for the Holidays," this advertising copy is remarkable misrepresentation. The movie does not get to the Christmas dinner (and the cake that the middle daughter is making is not a bûche de Nöel). There is very little that is funny, and the three daughters (Sabine Azema, Emmanuelle Béart, and Charlotte Gainsbourh, in descending birth order) do not scheme to get their parents back together after the death of their mother's second husband (the movie opens at his funeral). More than "Home for the Holidays," the American movie that comes to my mind watching "La Bûche" is an even talkier "Hannah and Her Sisters." Both are soap operas much more than comedies, though providing an occasional embarrassed laugh.


The parents (Françoise Fabian and (Francoise Fabian and Claude Rich) have supposedly not seen each other or communicated in the 25 years since their divorce, but on their own arrange a meeting, after the father has a near-death experience. The children do not know that they met and discussed infidelities from when they were married (and possible other paternities of the three daughters).


Daniele Thompson, the writer of scripts for such movies as "Cousin/Cousine" and "La reine Margot," wrote the script for "La Bûche" with her son, actor Christopher, who also plays Joseph, an unemployed divorced father of a daughter who is living in the annex of the house, taken in by and helping out the not very patriarchal father.


The Thompsons seem to have missed the "Show, don't tell!" class. The movie has no visual flare, nor much no character development except through flatly delivered exposition... until the three daughters are together and fail to tell two generative secrets, each of which is unknown to one of them. Though not especially funny, it is the best scene in the movie. The second best is a car ride after picks up his ex-wife, their daughter of whom he has court-mandate visitation/custody for the week, and his ex-wife's infant son.


I was surprised that almost all the Christmas songs were in English (heavy on Dean Martin crooning). The syrup is further sicked by Azema's character's reenering of "My Yiddeshe Mama" (she works in a Russian night club). And Michel Legrand added more treacle in the music he composed for the movie.


I found it difficult to engage with "La Bûche" and its dissatisfied characters, but came around by the end to sympathy rather than irritation for the various depressed characters (surprisingly, particularly for Emmanuelle Béart's Martha Stewart hostess manqué). The connections of blood seem to me to remain quite tenuous, but by the final third of the movie, I was at least interested in the individuals onscreen.


Thompson was married to an English financier, and their son was born in England. Her brief featurette on the DVD is in English with really awful looking clips from the movie. The feature itself does not suffer the same problems, fortunately.

©2010, Stephen O. Murray

For better holidaze movies see my list here.

This review is an entry to Bilbopooh's "Tis the Season" writeoff.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD