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La Buche (2000)
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Reviews Counted:20
Fresh:14
Rotten:6
Average Rating:6.4/10
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis:
LA BUCHE marks the directorial debut of Daniele Thompson, best known as the award-winning screenwriter of hit films like Cousin, Cousine and Queen Margot. Thompson, who also co-wrote, imbues LA...
LA BUCHE marks the directorial debut of Daniele Thompson, best known as the award-winning screenwriter of hit films like Cousin, Cousine and Queen Margot. Thompson, who also co-wrote, imbues LA BUCHE with a keen sense of holiday nostalgia as she follows various members of a Parisian family riven with discord over four eventful days before Christmas.
Following the Dec. 21 funeral of her second husband, Yvette (Francoise Fabian) is comforted by her three grown daughters by her now estranged first husband, Stanislas (Claude Rich), a retired Russian-Jewish violinist . The eldest, Louba (Sabine Azema), who lives with her father, carries on the musical tradition by singing crowd-pleasing bohemian standards at a Russian cabaret; Sonia (Emmanuelle Beart) is a perfectionist bourgeois housewife headed for a messy divorce; and the youngest, Milla (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is a hard-charging businesswoman with a tomboy demeanor.
After 12 years of trysts with married lover Gilbert (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), Louba unexpectedly finds herself pregnant for the first time at 42. Also around is Joseph (co-scripter Christopher Thompson), a slightly mysterious unemployed young man who has a 5-year-old daughter by his ex-wife, Annabelle (Isabelle Carre), and lives in a workshop in Stanislas' courtyard.
Thompson turns the neat trick of finding humor amidst the resentments and infidelities that in other hands may seem only suitable for tears, and achieves a surprising but highly satisfying family reconciliation. -- © Empire Pictures
Starring: Francoise Fabian, Sabine Azema, Emmanuelle Beart, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Starring: Francoise Fabian, Sabine Azema, Emmanuelle Beart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Claude Riche
Director: Daniele Thompson
Director: Daniele Thompson
Reviews for La Buche
Takes familiar material and gives it texture, subtlety and refinement.
This sort of Home for the Holidays fare is hardly new, and most of us get enough of it in real life.
Elegantly folds together multiple storylines ... into a confection that is ultimately better because of its bitterness.
A fine achievement along the lines of Jodie Foster's Home for the Holidays.
The tone is light, the Michel Legrand music is high in calories and the result is a very handsome, well-appointed soap opera.
Skirts most of the usual pitfalls of the genre while telling a compelling and enjoyable story of love, infidelity, and the ties that bind.
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