Who's in It: Louis Garrel, Romain Duris, Joana Preiss, Guy Marchand, Marie-France Pisier, Alice Butaud
The Basics: As an older brother lies in bed on Dec. 23, deep in depression over a breakup and having just attempted suicide, the younger brother does his best to bring his beloved sibling back to life. That he does so by going out to enjoy the Christmas windows at Paris' Bon Marché department store and further enjoying three different women in the course of one day is just one of the oddities that will only make sense if you stay with it until the end. But if you do, you'll feel like you've been given an early holiday gift.
What's the Deal? This is the peanut butter and chocolate of foreign-language film. It's a perfect fusion of bitter Gallic despair and sweetly sincere family love-bombing. Not overdone, not drowning in sentimentality, just wonderfully life-affirming. And if you're devoted to the films of the French New Wave, you'll be happy to play spot-the-reference to movies like Woman Is a Woman, Jules and Jim and Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Even cooler, Marchand and Pisier (who were lovers in Cousin, Cousine) play the parents, which is kind of stunt-casting for France.
J.D. Salinger meets J.-L. Godard in Movie Nerd Town: It doesn't exactly matter if you've read Franny and Zooey, Salinger's famous story of a brother and sister caring for each other, but if you have, then you'll know almost immediately where this movie stole its plot from. At one point, Garrel is seen in bed with an ex-girlfriend actually reading the book, and couples with books in bed is also a nod to Godard's habit of placing his actors in similar scenarios.
Where You've Seen These Guys Before: Duris is best known for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Garrel starred in Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
Jumping the Gun 11 Months Late: It's a little early in the year for this Christmas-set movie to get a release here (it came out in October 2006 in France), but don't let that keep you away. The way foreign-language movies do the slow rollout in the United States, you might just get it in your town close to the holidays. And if you never get French films where you live, then you can eventually make it a DVD double-feature with 1999's La Bûche, another cranky Christmas film from France.