Christmas & Co. (2017)

Christmas & Co. arrives in the well-worn tradition of French holiday comedy, which for the most part concerns itself with logistics. Santa's workshop, staffed by 92,000 toy manufacturers, is struck by a simultaneous illness, and the man himself must descend to Earth in search of a remedy. Alain Chabat directs and stars, bringing the shaggy, amiable presence he has carried through three decades of French comedy. The film wants nothing more than to be liked. It mostly earns the courtesy.

Culturally, the production is content to live inside its own snow globe. The ensemble is a standard French assembly, and the women in it, Golshifteh Farahani and Audrey Tautou among them, hold jobs and opinions without the screenplay ever mounting an argument about gender as a system. Nobody pauses to instruct the audience on how to live. There is a plot about sick workers and a magic cure, and that is the entire agenda. Questions of race, money, appetite, and the inner life go untouched. The film has no thesis to deliver, only a deadline to meet.

What remains is craft, of a modest and pleasant sort. The visual scheme leans on the usual reds and whites, the jokes land with the soft thud of a snowball, and the whole thing runs on the reliable engine of Chabat's comic timing. It is the kind of picture a family watches once in December and forgets by January, harmlessly. There is no sermon hiding in the tinsel. For a critic trained to detect ideological payloads in the most innocent confection, this is either a relief or a disappointment, depending on the hour. I found it restful.