''A Christmas Tale''

In the opening of Arnaud Desplechin’s "A Christmas Tale" ("Un Conte De Noel"), a wily and unendingly inventive drama of family dysfunction stirred up over a Christmas gathering, the story of the long-ago death of the family first born to leukemia is dramatized as shadow puppet theater. It’s tender and lovely and quite delicate, an evocative way to suggest the theatricality of memory and the blurring of detail over time. Two and a half hours later, as eldest sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) sits at her desk putting her thoughts of family and fears and sins she can’t forgive into a diary in the final shots of the film, a photo of that very shadow theater can be seen on her desk. It’s the final shot of the film and it echoes the opening images in a whisper. It’s the kind of detail that connects imagery and meaning, memory and emotion, past and present, life and death.