Ismael’s Ghosts – first look review

The very sim­ple idea that peo­ple lead more com­pli­cat­ed lives that we could ever hope to fath­om is played out over a twist­ing and impul­sive duel nar­ra­tive in Arnaud Desplechin’s enter­tain­ing­ly scat­ter­shot and impetu­ous Cannes open­er, Ismael’s Ghosts. Char­lotte Gains­bourg, play­ing an ethe­re­al waif and astro­physi­cist named Sylvia, claims she wants to remove the mask of her shab­by, charm­ing film direc­tor lover, Ismael (Math­ieu Amal­ric). But when she begins to tug at the edges, she sees more than expect­ed – a tumult of wrench­ing expe­ri­ence and a real­i­ty that now haunts his dreams.

19 years pri­or to their meet­ing, Ismael was mar­ried to Car­lot­ta (Mar­i­on Cotil­lard), who one day just hopped on to a train and start­ed a new life. Unable to fath­om the dis­tress she caused him, she returns, a lit­tle cracked and crazy in a bid restart her life with him and nudge the dot­ing and very accom­mo­dat­ing Sylvia out of the frame. This is a film where char­ac­ters lives are are guid­ed by their heart. They feel their way through sit­u­a­tions and under­stand that there is no way of pre­dict­ing cause or effect. Desplechin writes the film in a sim­i­lar man­ner, flit­ting between time­lines, sub­jects and per­spec­tives, wring­ing out the emo­tion in front of us with lit­tle care for exact­ly where it falls.

It sounds pre­ten­tious to talk in these terms but Desplechin’s film­mak­ing feels like it draws its ener­gy from poet­ry and music as much as it does lit­er­a­ture and film his­to­ry. This wind­ing, indul­gent film has involved vers­es and then, sud­den­ly, a soar­ing emo­tion­al cho­rus, and then there’s a nood­ly bridge sec­tion and then an off-kil­ter har­mo­ny segue­ing in from the sec­ondary plot-strand. There’s a moment where two char­ac­ters wax ana­lyt­i­cal about Jack­son Pollock’s paint­ing, Laven­der Mist, specif­i­cal­ly the bio­graph­i­cal details hid­den with­in the unformed pas­tel blotch­es. Maybe this is the direc­tor giv­ing him­self an out, assur­ing that there is con­ven­tion­al form to this wild tale, you just have to search for it.

But while he dances around, fill­ing the mouths of is char­ac­ters with the most exquis­ite roman­tic utter­ances, from nowhere he’ll pull just an emo­tion­al molo­tov from his camo trench-coat and hurl it towards the screen. Car­lot­ta cheek­i­ly bops to Bob Dylan as way to invei­gle her way back into the life she was so quick to dis­card, while Sylvia, look­ing on, reacts by not know­ing whether to sob or chuck­le. The film is at its best when the char­ac­ters inter­act in close quar­ters. Expo­si­tion sequences and the stretch­es where a mar­ble-gath­er­ing time out is tak­en slow things down and drain the visu­al energy.

The film-with­in-a-film ele­ment is a bizarre John Le Car­ré spy pas­tiche star­ring Louis Gar­rel and Alba Rohrwach­er. It’s hard to see where the two sto­ries bisect beyond being a real­i­sa­tion of Ismael’s boy­hood fan­ta­sy, or maybe the invent­ed life he would’ve lead had he nev­er met Car­lot­ta. There are hat tips to a lot of Alfred Hitch­cock films such as Ver­ti­go, The Lady Van­ish­es and The Man Who Wasn’t There, but they sel­dom betray more depth than just being arch cinephile ref­er­ence points.

Yes, it’s a mess, an occa­sion­al­ly glo­ri­ous one all told, and the last thing you’d ever want to hap­pen is for Desplechin to set­tle down, moth­ball his fix­a­tions (diplo­ma­cy, rap music, iris shots, the north­ern French city of Roubaix) and make some­thing for the kids in the peanut gallery. Under­neath it all is a mourn­ful lament to the pain of age­ing and the feel­ing that, even while you’re still breath­ing, you can chose to stop liv­ing and lov­ing. Maybe this is the end of a cycle for this idio­syn­crat­ic mae­stro? Can’t wait to see what he does next, even if he does feel like tak­ing one more bite of the cherry.