DVD distributors have largely exhausted themselves of new titles to release before the Christmas rush. The third series of excellent Scandi detective saga The Bridge (Arrow, 15) and Julien Temple’s unexpectedly exuberant The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (Cadiz, E) are clear standouts in this week’s pack, though tangled Malmö murder investigations and documentaries about cancer-stricken rock guitarists, however vibrantly executed, aren’t everyone’s idea of yuletide viewing. Further assuming that the prospect of watching Hitman: Agent 47 doesn’t fill you with festive cheer, I’m giving this week’s column over to a few more holiday-minded films – some obvious, some more laterally Christmassy – available to stream and download.
My wholly subjective selection begins with the very best of all Christmas movies starring James Stewart. I speak not of It’s a Wonderful Life – though Frank Capra’s eternal corn-syrup staple is easily Netflixable if you’ve somehow never seen it – but The Shop Around the Corner, which deserves equal levels of ubiquity. All warmly human sentiment with markedly little sentimentality, Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy of the inadvertent epistolary courtship between two sparring shop workers (Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) still rings truer, smarter and sharper than its 1998 remake You’ve Got Mail. Its bustling Christmas time setting, in the cosy studio confines of Burbank-constructed Budapest, counters the bittersweet melancholy of the romance itself, but is hardly background noise: the importance of holiday companionship has never been more sweetly stressed.
Lubitsch’s film can be found on iTunes, along with my next classic pick. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t a routine inclusion on Christmas-staple lists, yet its snow-caked Christmas Eve coda is about the loveliest evocation of the season’s capacity for reunion and regret I can think of. Even discounting that direct relevance, however, Jacques Demy’s heart-swelling musical, charting the star-crossed love affair between two struggling young romantics on the Normandy coast, is so rich in feeling and awash with rapturous colour that it feels like a special occasion in itself.
A pleasingly counterintuitive addition to Mubi.com’s December viewing menu, Swiss film-maker Ursula Meier’s underexposed 2012 jewel Sister has no intention of being classified as a holiday movie, though it begins around Noel – in one vivid scene, a Christmas tree is felled in unseasonal blue light – and chugs along until Easter, seeing out the winter in and around a moneyed ski resort. But the film now always comes to my mind at this time of year. Portraying the joint coming of age of a scrappy 12-year-old thief (the wonderful Kacey Mottet Klein) and his wayward older sister and guardian (Léa Seydoux) as they eke out a modest living on the slopes, it’s a sly, moving story of complex familial togetherness, hard-fought through thick and (mostly) thin.
My final pick is a film I sought in vain on other streaming platforms, only to find it finally – as a welcome free Christmas gift – on YouTube. Concerned in very different ways with fragile personal bonds, John Huston’s The Dead doesn’t even take place at Christmas, but it comes close enough to feel appropriate. The early January feast of the epiphany is the setting for this elegiac, immaculate adaptation of James Joyce’s short story, in which two spinster sisters’ music-filled holiday soiree in Edwardian Dublin is the springboard for a sequence of confessions and shivery shards of memory between the guests. Huston’s final work, it’s a film of emotional stocktaking, delicately attuned to the loneliness that can be found in large gatherings, but hardly immune to comfort and joy.
