LONDON: ‘Incendiary,’ ‘A Christmas Tale,’ ‘Blind Loves’

I’ve been swamped with screenings at the London Film Festival, so between watching the films, maintaining some semblance of a day job and occasionally remembering to sleep and eat, my review updates have got a bit behind track.

Hopefully, I can make up some of the distance tomorrow, when I have a lighter screening schedule, so expect a compilation of capsule reviews shortly, as well as some more in-depth evaluations of titles like Steve McQueen’s fascinating “Hunger.” In the meantime, here are some thoughts on three notable (if not necessarily successful) titles that made their London bow on the weekend:

INCENDIARY (**)

Steadily, and with very little fuss, Michelle Williams is growing into a remarkable young actress, as this, the first of three films she has in the festival, makes clear. It’s one thing to shine in a film as immaculately crafted as “Brokeback Mountain,” but it’s quite another to shoulder a project as problematic as Sharon Maguire’s “Incendiary.”

A wildly confused, schizophrenic film based on a controversial novel, it stars Williams as a working-class London mother whose life is thrown into turmoil when her husband (a bomb disposal officer) and young son are killed in a (fictitious) terrorist attack on Arsenal football stadium. A low-key study of grieving ramps up into convoluted thriller territory when a journalist (Ewan McGregor), with whom the woman is having an affair, senses a cover-up and brings her into the investigation.

At this point, “Incendiary” — evidently inspired by the 2005 terrorist attacks on London, and posing as a faintly disingenuous hymn to the city’s resilience — loses its grip on reality entirely. Maguire has the sole script credit, but the film bears the scars of all too many rewrites and script consultants, obscuring any clear idea of what it originally intended to say.

Valiantly keeping the whole unwieldy contraption (barely) afloat is Williams, who offers a vivid, disconcerting portrait of a woman uncertain of her own right to grieve. With her flattened vocal inflections and defensive body language evoking a very specific vein of British femininity, her work here is more focused and immediate than anything else in this bewildering film.

A CHRISTMAS TALE (***)

Also bewildering, but in a rather better way, was Arnaud Desplechin’s Cannes hit “A Christmas Tale,” a rambling, overstuffed but consistently entertaining family melodrama that improves as it goes on — and, at over 150 minutes, it does indeed go on. Another take on the old ‘home for the holidays’ template, it tracks the emotionally fraught reunion of a large, dysfunctional family, all with issues too tangled to explain here, drawn together by Catherine Deneuve’s leukemia-afflicted matriarch.

Desplechin hurtles from one heated confrontation to another with little breathing space between scenes, employing a cornucopia of florid stylistic devices employed haphazardly — a voiceover here, an iris-in transition there, with some chapter headings thrown in — and the initial effect is exhausting.

However, once you buy into the film’s arch literary tone and heightened theatricality, there’s much to enjoy, not least a magnetic performance from Mathieu Amalric as the family’s ne’er-do-well elder son. Tempering his rumpled, easy charm with a cold streak of fury, his mere presence jolts the film to life whenever he is on screen, and his scenes with Deneuve, wherein mother and son tensely negotiate the fallout of their relationship, are the film’s most complex and emotionally rewarding.

Some of Desplechin’s dramatic throughlines — such as sibling rivalry and terminal disease — could are on the maudlin side, but the film skirts soap-opera territory thanks to ambiguous characterisation and vein of tart, nasty humour cutting through the writing. In the final act, “A Christmas Tale” works toward a hard-won note of redemption that might just make it it a great alt-Christmas movie for years to come.

BLIND LOVES (***)

Slovakia’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film race (and, I think, a potential spoiler for the shortlist), Juraj Lehotsky’s clumsily structured but insightful little film follows the lives of four real-life blind people seeking love and acceptance between the more practical challenges of daily life.

Successfully marrying documentary-style observation with more impressionistic techniques (including an utterly captivating animated sequence), Lehotsky creates an unusually forthright and unsentimental account of how these people live — raising any number of everyday complications that would never cross most people’s minds. The film offers little in the way of drama, but that, to an extent, is the point — the film’s goal, after all, is to show its subjects managing their disability rather than struggling with it.

Remarkably, the film feels entirely unexploitative, and isn’t afraid to go for occasional humour, either. Its major debit is the jerky, unbalanced narrative structure, which begins in distinct chapters and then, over halfway through, tries to interweave the strands, leading to some disorienting time jumps. It is a minor quibble in an otherwise courageous and resourceful film.