season's beatings (la bûche) 1999 (béart, gainsbourg, azéma) region free dvd5 french bcbc

Season's Beatings (French: La bûche) is a 1999 French comedy-drama film directed by Danièle Thompson and starring Sabine Azéma, Emmanuelle Béart, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Claude Rich.

Contains movie and Optional English Subtitles. No menus or extras. Regular DVD quality. Thank you.

Spoken Language: French (some English, Russian)













Synopsis

In this lightweight French comedy from screenwriter-turned-director Daniele Thompson, three daughters, Sonia (Emmanuelle Béart), Louba (Sabine Azéma) and Milla (Charlotte Gainsbourg), 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.



Cast

Sabine Azéma, Emmanuelle Béart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Claude Rich, Françoise Fabian, Christopher Thompson, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Isabelle Carré



Movie Review

La Buche (1999)

November 17, 2000

FILM REVIEW; A French Noel With All the Trimmings (Lovers, Secrets . . .)

By A. O. SCOTT

''La Buche,'' which opens today at the Paris, is a minor miracle: a Christmas movie that won't leave you with indigestion, a splitting headache or a mouth full of cavities. Even though it takes place over the four busy shopping days leading up to Dec. 25, Daniele Thompson's warmly satisfying new film isn't really a Christmas movie at all. It forswears sentimentality and enforced good cheer for deft insight and complex, understated emotions, including the affliction that several of the film's characters call ''hostile depression,'' the Gallic equivalent of seasonal affective disorder. Even if you hate everything about the holidays -- and especially if you hate the kind of movies that herald them -- you will find much to love in ''La Buche.''



The movie begins with an aggressive tongue-in-cheek assault on the senses: mobbed department stores glutinously decked out in gold tinsel, jammed Paris streets festooned with lights and the soundtrack playing an especially shrill children's-chorus rendition of ''Jingle Bells.''



The opening montage abruptly resolves into a funeral procession, and it takes a while to figure out the identity of the deceased and just who he is to the people gathered around his grave. The solemnity of the occasion is punctured by a trilling cell phone. As the mourners check their purses and coat pockets, it becomes clear the the sound is coming from inside the coffin. It's the widow, who somehow hasn't been given the news of her husband's death.



Relations among the living are similarly complicated, and the film is studded with small, sparkling comic surprises like that ringing phone. Because it concerns the painful, loving relationships among three sisters and a large supporting cast of parents, lovers and husbands, ''La Buche'' will inevitably remind some of Woody Allen's ''Hannah and Her Sisters.'' Ms. Thompson, a leading French screenwriter making an extraordinarily accomplished directorial debut, is less misanthropic than Mr. Allen. She balances psychological acuity and impish wit with a deep, even-keeled compassion.



Louba, Sonia, and Milla are the three daughters of Yvette (Francoise Fabian), who left her husband Stanislas (Claude Rich) 25 years ago for the rival violinist whose burial sets the plot in motion. The 42-year old Louba (Sabine Azema) lives with her father and seems temperamentally to be the most like him, bohemian and impulsive. She ekes out a living singing at a Russian nightclub and meets her longtime lover, Gilbert (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), in empty houses, sneaking out before the prospective buyers arrive.



In contrast, the middle sister, Sonia (Emmanuelle Beart), has escaped to the gilded cage of a proper, sterile bourgeois marriage to a snobbish stockbroker whom Stanislas, who is Jewish, insists is a closet fascist. (''He has an anti-Semitic nose.'') The youngest daughter, Milla (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is her father's favorite, brilliant, brittle and lonely, without Louba's compliant charm or Sonia's coping skills.



Their lives, individually and collectively, are much too complicated to summarize, and in any case one of the pleasures of ''La Buche'' is watching their personalities and situations unfold over time. Everyone in the movie has a secret, but rather than build toward a melodramatic surprise ending, Ms. Thompson sprinkles discreet clues through the story and invites us to figure things out for ourselves.



She is also brilliantly aware that family members often discover one another's secrets not as a result of big confrontations but through hunches, gossip and guesswork. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of revelations in store, several involving the mysteries of paternity and pregnancy, as befits the season.



The three central performances are themselves revelatory. Ms. Gainsbourg, daughter of the French pop singer Serge Gainsbourg and the English actress Jane Birkin, has some of her mother's haunted beauty, but also an intense, intelligent forthrightness. She is especially good in her scenes with Joseph (Christopher Thompson, the director's son, who collaborated with her on the screenplay), a melancholy young man of mysterious background who is renting Stanislas's old studio. The older generation acquits itself nicely. Ms. Fabian and Mr. Rich nearly steal the movie in a scene of drunken marital score-settling.



Most remarkably, ''La Buche,'' busy as it is with the making and unmaking of marriages and friendships, never feels hectic or overloaded. It unfolds with the verve and clarity of a piece of music, carefully composed and passionately played. The soundtrack may be full of schmaltz -- a satirical cavalcade of American holiday hits and a sincere performance of ''My Yiddishe Mama'' -- but the movie is all meticulous counterpoint and deftly executed grace notes.