Ma Saison Preferee (My Favorite Season)

Catherine Deneuve is dressed down in "Ma Saison Preferee" (translated as "My Favorite Season"), but there's no way to make her dowdy. So her famous fabulous face is used as part of the tapestry for this turgid melodrama about a dysfunctional family suffering from terminal angst.

Deneuve plays Emilie, a middle-aged woman who craves affection but seems unable to return it. She is stuck in a sterile marriage, and it doesn't help that she shares an office with her husband Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), where they work together as lawyers.

The next generation isn't doing any better, as their introverted daughter Anne (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve's real-life daughter) has immersed herself in her law-school studies at the expense of a social life, and their ill-mannered adopted son Lucien (Anthony Prada) works as a bouncer in a bar.

Emilie's psychological damage stems from her relationships with her overbearing, 76-year-old mother Bertha (Marthe Villalonga) and her eccentric, obsessive brother Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a well-known surgeon and confirmed bachelor.

As the film opens, Emilie's mother suffers a mild stroke, so Emilie takes her into her home. But Mom can't butt out, Bruno and the children can't stand her and Emilie is unable to control her well-ordered life when she's around.

So, Emilie looks up her brother, whom she hasn't seen in three years (ever since Antoine caused a ruckus at their home by insulting Bruno). She'd like him to take Mom in, of course, but she doesn't come right out and ask. Instead, she invites Antoine over for Christmas, and, predictably, another ruckus occurs, with Antoine and Bruno slugging it out.

Eventually, Emilie will leave Bruno and move in with her brother, a feeble and doomed attempt to revisit the life she remembers from her childhood. For his part, Antoine is hopelessly in love with his sister, which has resulted in a life that is even more sterile than Emilie's.

As the film unfolds in blackout segments, the characters seem to become more and more distant, which may have a similar effect on the audience. Despite a few psychological explosions here and there, the drama is muted most of the way and it's sometimes downright dull.

A meandering subplot that has nothing to do with the rest of the film doesn't help, as Emilie and Bruno's law clerk (Carmen Chaplin) displays her free-spirited sexual antics, which drives both Lucien and Anne crazy. (Since the film runs more than two hours, these scenes could easily have been trimmed.)

The actors seem to be game for whatever humiliations filmmaker Andre Techine ("Wild Reeds") thrusts upon them, but for all the time they spend talking to each other, the characters remain surprisingly underdeveloped.

"Ma Saison Preferee" is not rated, but would certainly receive an R for sex, nudity, profanity, vulgarity, violence and a shot of mutilated animals.