The series A posteriori le cinéma is intended to be an opportunity to celebrate the 7the art by revisiting flagship titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
When it comes to Christmas films, everything is often a matter of generations and movie-loving dispositions. Whether it’s bittersweet It’s a Wonderful Life (Life is beautiful), hectic Die Hard (crystal trap), the irreverent Scrooged (Ghosts celebrating), comedy Home Alone (Mom I missed the plane), or fanciful Elf (The Elf), everyone has their favorite. However, in this register, there is a film which arouses particular affection and enthusiasm: A Christmas Story (A Christmas story). Besides possessing all the qualities of the other feature films listed, Bob Clark’s, released 40 years ago, exudes a nostalgia that is not sweet, but bittersweet. We follow the indescribable Ralphie Parker, 9 years old, between wonder and disenchantment, as December 25 approaches.
Set around 1940, the film is narrated in the first person, in an irresistible deadpan tone, by Jean Shepherd, the author of the radio vignettes and the book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash at the origin of the scenario.
On the surface, the Parker family could not be more archetypal for the time: dad gruff but good, mom rightly exasperated but infinitely patient, annoying little brother… And Ralphie (Peter Billingsley, wonderful), who perceives himself as eternally misunderstood .
But precisely, behind the imposed figures and the imagery straight out of Norman Rockwell paintings, there is this exquisite grain of madness. Because each member of the family has his own obsession: the father who hates the neighbor’s dogs, the mother who only thinks about her turkey, the brother who refuses to eat… So many idiosyncrasies which, through repetition and variations, give rise to delicious moments of ordinary alienation.
When it comes to “obsession”, Ralphie is no exception. For Christmas, in fact, he only dreams of one thing: the “Red Ryder cowboy rifle with compressed air and 200 shots”.
Alas, when, after many detours and procrastination, Ralphie expresses his wish, his mother immediately retorts: “You will put out your eye. »
Livid, Ralphie is not at the end of his troubles, since he will hear these vexing words uttered by his teacher, as well as, by supreme discomfiture, a department store Santa Claus. This last episode is one of the countless cult scenes in the film. Another is the one where the father is ecstatic in front of the lamp in the shape of a female leg covered in fishnet that he won in a competition (the mother “accidentally” breaks it during an equally harrowing scene).
Also engraved in the memory: this passage during which Ralphie, after having been intimidated and mistreated one too many times by the terror of the neighborhood, sends his bully to the mat. No, violence doesn’t solve anything, but anyone who has experienced bullying in their life will rejoice.
Without forgetting this sequence where, after being challenged (“I tell you to re-re-re-chiche!” or “I’m telling you to re-re-re-chiche!” I triple-dog dare you ! “), a classmate of Ralphie’s tries to lick an icy metal pole where his tongue gets stuck. And the children flee in panic before the firefighters arrive! For the anecdote, Bob Clark and his team tinkered with this illusion by connecting a vacuum cleaner to a false pole pierced with a hole invisible to the camera, and to which the young actor could rivet his tongue without danger.
“The image of that tongue being stretched out and, of course, torn out, is simply horrifying, hilarious, and painful, and it is forever etched in our minds,” wrote Kevin P. Sullivan in 2016 in Entertainment Weekly.
A realistic satire
In a second article published the same year, this one by Vanity Fairwe can read from the pen of Sam Kashner: “ A Christmas Story forever changed the previously warm and sentimental holiday cinema as a genre […] It was a new type of holiday movie. A film that recognized — and even relished — the unbridled greed, consumerism, disappointments, hurt feelings, and general bad luck that, in reality, often define the holiday season. In other words, what real Christmas was like in real families. [Ce film] offered a bracing blast of satire and realism, wrapped in a perfectly hilarious story of a middle-class family negotiating the perils of Christmas, all told through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy. »
When registering A Christmas STory in his register of “Great films”, in 2000, the critic Roger Ebert summed up: “ A Christmas Story is not just about Christmas and air rifles, but also about childhood, and every detail rings true, one after the other […] There are many perfect little moments in A Christmas Story…These moments are why so many people watch A Christmas Story every holiday season. There is a real understanding of human nature behind the comedy. »
The “people who watch A Christmas Story » are legion in this case. As proof, for decades, certain American channels have broadcast the film on loop for 24 hours.
Another example of the fervor generated by the film: a man named Brian Jones transformed the Cleveland house used in the film into a museum “ A Christmas Story », after purchasing the property on eBay in 2004 (!). On opening day, the line was five blocks long.
For the record, the majority of the film was shot in and around Toronto, including all the scenes inside the Parker home: a studio-built set. Not that we detect the artifice for a single moment.
All-round authenticity
Fact, A Christmas Story, a low-budget co-production between the United States and Canada, exudes an authenticity absent from traditional Hollywood productions. And this authenticity is not just visual: it is, perhaps above all, emotional.
As Cynthia Littleton recalls in Variety in 2020: “ A Christmas Story makes a wonderful gift for anyone who remembers the feeling of ants in the legs waking up before dawn on December 25, wondering if the object of desire is waiting for us under the tree or No. »
If Bob Clark’s film has stood the test of time to this extent, it is perhaps, ultimately, because this famous tingling sensation never really leaves us.
The film A Christmas Story is available on VOD on most platforms.