For the third time, my wife and I watched "Love at the Christmas Table", having enjoyed it the first two times, but feeling that we were left wondering about details.
This time we made sure we watched WITH SUBTITLES to catch all the funny dialogue (!).
Third time around, it was surprisingly more than my wife or I had remembered. And very satisfying, and funny, and sometimes sad.
Other reviews have outlined the story of a boy, Sam, and girl, Cat, who grow up to be a man and woman who are seemingly made for one another, but only come close to connecting at the family-and-business Christmas Eve party hosted by an older woman who seems to have dedicated her home to being permanently Christmas.
The film begins at the start of what is actually the last of these Christmas Eve parties (ultimately, as it happens, the first of many very different Christmas Eve parties that will happen in the future).
Then we jump back to early flashback vignettes of Sam and Cat as children, at the first Christmas Eve party. And then we proceed, with jumps of a year or so at a time, through the boy and girl being older children, and then young adolescents, and then high school, and college students. Each of these glimpses of the boy and girl interacting, sometimes with friends, were often funny.
Watching the film for our third time, we could now make sense of the essential underlying problem of Cat's widower father, who shows no interest in any other women, while EB (Elissa Beth), the seemingly Christmas-mad lady who hosts all the Christmas Eve parties, and keeps her home decorated for Christmas all year, silently adores Cat's father. Sadly, EB also realises that she is like Miss Haversham, in "Great Expectations", which she makes clear when she gives Cat an old copy of Charles Dickens' novel and explains the emotional core of the novel in startling detail to Cat, now in her early twenties. EB became hopelessly frozen in the idea of Christmas Eve when she saw Cat's father deeply in love with the woman he would marry, just as Miss Haversham becomes bitterly frozen in the never-ending morning of her wedding that never happened. And EB expressly tells Cat that she is in danger of becoming another Miss Haversham, never allowing herself to accept Sam, even when she sees Sam almost marrying clever half-Australian Rebekah, UN translator and multi-linguist who lives in London, and away.
Meanwhile, Sam, after he leaves school, and trains as a journalist, is seen going through one superficial newspaper job after another, as though he is also incapable of making up his mind, while trying, one Christmas Eve after another, to catch Cat's complete attention, and win her love.
These last sections - Christmas Eves of Sam and Cat in their late-twenties, are sad in many ways, with their obvious friendship almost tipping into sexual attraction and acknowledged mutual emotional attraction, but running into conflict, even while the fast humour continues in the party games and repartee and private in-jokes.
For example, Cat repeatedly punches Sam's arm, in a childishly friendly way, like two little kids fooling with each other.
Also, through several of the vignettes, Sam insists on playing "Best Life", a challenge-and-respond game. The idea of "Best Life" seems to be that one of the players describes some wacky scenario, and the other player must make the best of that surreal situation: such as waking up and finding your fingers are all mice; but we do not hear how that is resolved. Another earlier challenge occurs when Cat says Sam has lost his sense of smell. Sam's response is hilarious. He says if he lost his sense of smell, he could be blighted, as a human, because smell is so intimately associated with other sensory experiences, including sex; OR, he could become the highly paid bath-house attendant of the King of Brunei, whose revolting diet - rancid beans and boiled goat, or something equally flatulent - would disgust anyone who did have a sense of smell: loss of smell could be a good career-move.
Finally, Sam discovers that Cat is not just an office-worker but actually very good and creative at her job, in the top-quality furniture business that her father and Sam's father established when they were young men.
This furniture company had been the initial stimulus for all the business-and-family Christmas Eve parties.
Then Cat confronts EB, telling her that EB has been the only mother, or mother-figure, she properly had, especially through her early adolescence and puberty. Cat then provides an engagement ring, and persuades EB and her father to admit their feelings for each other.
Meanwhile, secretly, Sam has created a dream-home (of cardboard walls, decorated with childhood crayon drawings of windows and furniture) for Cat, and when Cat sees this she realises Sam wants to spend his new working-from-home blogging job alongside her.
(It seems that many reviewers of this film have not grasped the way this succession of separate Christmas Eves, and the whole story behind them, of the death of Cat's mother, and the emotional ripples that came from that, make sense. Could there have been abridged versions of this film that cut crucial details?) So far, also, there are no IMDB Quotes from a film that is full of jokes and repartee that make the seemingly confusing story sparkle.
The occasional wordless, but very meaningful looks of the two fathers, and EB, and some of the minor younger characters and friends, are also hard to describe. But they show how Cat and Sam are seen, and understood, and misunderstood (!), by those around them.
When you make all the connections (furniture business; fathers who are best friends and successful business partners; one father widowed; another woman's silent unrequited love; the young girl grieving her mother's death, and connected to her father's grief and suspended emotions; the young man whose eccentric cleverness clashes with his emotional shyness; Dickens' "Miss Haversham" and her frozen refusal to re-engage with life) the film is surprisingly clever, insightful, warm, funny, and a deeply rewarding Christmas romance.
Highly recommended!!
This time we made sure we watched WITH SUBTITLES to catch all the funny dialogue (!).
Third time around, it was surprisingly more than my wife or I had remembered. And very satisfying, and funny, and sometimes sad.
Other reviews have outlined the story of a boy, Sam, and girl, Cat, who grow up to be a man and woman who are seemingly made for one another, but only come close to connecting at the family-and-business Christmas Eve party hosted by an older woman who seems to have dedicated her home to being permanently Christmas.
The film begins at the start of what is actually the last of these Christmas Eve parties (ultimately, as it happens, the first of many very different Christmas Eve parties that will happen in the future).
Then we jump back to early flashback vignettes of Sam and Cat as children, at the first Christmas Eve party. And then we proceed, with jumps of a year or so at a time, through the boy and girl being older children, and then young adolescents, and then high school, and college students. Each of these glimpses of the boy and girl interacting, sometimes with friends, were often funny.
Watching the film for our third time, we could now make sense of the essential underlying problem of Cat's widower father, who shows no interest in any other women, while EB (Elissa Beth), the seemingly Christmas-mad lady who hosts all the Christmas Eve parties, and keeps her home decorated for Christmas all year, silently adores Cat's father. Sadly, EB also realises that she is like Miss Haversham, in "Great Expectations", which she makes clear when she gives Cat an old copy of Charles Dickens' novel and explains the emotional core of the novel in startling detail to Cat, now in her early twenties. EB became hopelessly frozen in the idea of Christmas Eve when she saw Cat's father deeply in love with the woman he would marry, just as Miss Haversham becomes bitterly frozen in the never-ending morning of her wedding that never happened. And EB expressly tells Cat that she is in danger of becoming another Miss Haversham, never allowing herself to accept Sam, even when she sees Sam almost marrying clever half-Australian Rebekah, UN translator and multi-linguist who lives in London, and away.
Meanwhile, Sam, after he leaves school, and trains as a journalist, is seen going through one superficial newspaper job after another, as though he is also incapable of making up his mind, while trying, one Christmas Eve after another, to catch Cat's complete attention, and win her love.
These last sections - Christmas Eves of Sam and Cat in their late-twenties, are sad in many ways, with their obvious friendship almost tipping into sexual attraction and acknowledged mutual emotional attraction, but running into conflict, even while the fast humour continues in the party games and repartee and private in-jokes.
For example, Cat repeatedly punches Sam's arm, in a childishly friendly way, like two little kids fooling with each other.
Also, through several of the vignettes, Sam insists on playing "Best Life", a challenge-and-respond game. The idea of "Best Life" seems to be that one of the players describes some wacky scenario, and the other player must make the best of that surreal situation: such as waking up and finding your fingers are all mice; but we do not hear how that is resolved. Another earlier challenge occurs when Cat says Sam has lost his sense of smell. Sam's response is hilarious. He says if he lost his sense of smell, he could be blighted, as a human, because smell is so intimately associated with other sensory experiences, including sex; OR, he could become the highly paid bath-house attendant of the King of Brunei, whose revolting diet - rancid beans and boiled goat, or something equally flatulent - would disgust anyone who did have a sense of smell: loss of smell could be a good career-move.
Finally, Sam discovers that Cat is not just an office-worker but actually very good and creative at her job, in the top-quality furniture business that her father and Sam's father established when they were young men.
This furniture company had been the initial stimulus for all the business-and-family Christmas Eve parties.
Then Cat confronts EB, telling her that EB has been the only mother, or mother-figure, she properly had, especially through her early adolescence and puberty. Cat then provides an engagement ring, and persuades EB and her father to admit their feelings for each other.
Meanwhile, secretly, Sam has created a dream-home (of cardboard walls, decorated with childhood crayon drawings of windows and furniture) for Cat, and when Cat sees this she realises Sam wants to spend his new working-from-home blogging job alongside her.
(It seems that many reviewers of this film have not grasped the way this succession of separate Christmas Eves, and the whole story behind them, of the death of Cat's mother, and the emotional ripples that came from that, make sense. Could there have been abridged versions of this film that cut crucial details?) So far, also, there are no IMDB Quotes from a film that is full of jokes and repartee that make the seemingly confusing story sparkle.
The occasional wordless, but very meaningful looks of the two fathers, and EB, and some of the minor younger characters and friends, are also hard to describe. But they show how Cat and Sam are seen, and understood, and misunderstood (!), by those around them.
When you make all the connections (furniture business; fathers who are best friends and successful business partners; one father widowed; another woman's silent unrequited love; the young girl grieving her mother's death, and connected to her father's grief and suspended emotions; the young man whose eccentric cleverness clashes with his emotional shyness; Dickens' "Miss Haversham" and her frozen refusal to re-engage with life) the film is surprisingly clever, insightful, warm, funny, and a deeply rewarding Christmas romance.
Highly recommended!!