2017 ‘Les Fantômes d'Ismaël’ Directed by Arnaud Desplechin
The film tells the tale of a widowed film director who is in the middle of making a film about an atypical diplomat inspired by his brother. While he has started a new life with Sylvia, he still mourns the death of a former lover, Carlotta, who passed away 20 years earlier; then Carlotta returns from the dead, causing Sylvia to run away.
Mathieu Amalric Marion Cotillard Charlotte Gainsbourg Louis Garrel Alba Rohrwacher Hippolyte Girardot Jacques Nolot Catherine Mouchet László Szabó Samir Guesmi Mélodie Richard Marc Prin Bruno Todeschini Pascal Ternisien Philippe Fretun Bernard Bloch Guillaume Briat Marc Berman Eric Franquelin Philippe Soutan Zohar Wexler Yaël Fogiel Ricky Tribord Isabelle Sadoyan Rémy Roubakha Jacques Lassalle Gennadiy Fomin
Призраки Измаила, Les Fantômes d’Ismaël, 이스마엘의 유령
my first ever Cannes screening! and who should sit next to me but Jeff Wells. welcome to the party, pal.
anyone, Desplechin's latest is shaggy and scattershot, even by his standards, but it's certainly not without its charms. i mean, this is a movie where Marion Cotillard refers to herself as "a renegade jew," so… yeah, i'm in. i greatly preferred this during the early going, where it flirts with the idea of reimagining SOLARIS as an antic French relationship drama (complete with Mathieu Amalric being even more wild-eyed than usual)… and then even pivots towards PERSONA territory once it drops the magical-realism shtick…
but then Desplechin gets in his own way and sinks the movie as he lightens the…
Pretty much a Desplechin joint: scattershot, generous, maddening and expansive. One suspects every idea ends up at the movie, for good and for worse. The dozen or so best bits makes up for all the clunkers. The middle age navel gazing here lacks the larger self-interrogation of My Golden Days. Yet, there is a sense of uncentainty, of a world falling apart that is consistent intriguing. Great actors (particular Cotillard and Gainsbourg), but that's too be expect. Sort of an affirming abyss, a very bourgeois walk through a tightrope.
Je note un peu à la hausse, mais les circonstances l'obligent: d'abord parce qu'il m'est apparu évident cette fois-ci que c'est une adaptation de Contesting Tears de Stanley Cavell, le livre que je suis en train de finir de relire en pensant à Scarlett et Jennifer ; une adaptation disons du point de vue masculin (mais pas vraiment, le film étant raconté du point de vue de Charlotte Gainsbourg sur son mari toujours hanté par la disparition de sa femme il y a de ça vingt ans). Desplechin étant un cavellien accompli et affirmé, il n'y a là rien d'exagéré de ma part - d'ailleurs, Cavell est explicitement dans le film : le discours d'un père mourant à sa fille…
The unexpected return of his wife, who mysteriously disappeared more than twenty years ago, provokes a strong crisis in a tormented filmmaker who tries to set up his next project. Les Fantômes d'Ismaël is a disjointed, unnecessarily long, and extremely tedious film. Arnaud Desplechin starts with a promising premise that soon loses its way by dividing into several unsatisfactory, uninteresting, and unemotional narrative lines, culminating in a hasty ending. A frustrating and chaotic experience that wants to talk about many things and, in the end says, absolutely nothing and that is only worth for the performances of the protagonists, even if their characters may become irritating or act unconvincingly.
The ethereal quality of Arnaud Desplechin’s films makes it often quite difficult to write about them, and his 2017 Cannes Film Festival opener Ismael’s Ghosts isn’t an exception. Yet this elusiveness, together with a sense of often overwhelming ambition, make this particular film possibly the best picture we have of Desplechin’s buzzing mind.
Following his tradition of cinematic alter egos, Desplechin centres on Ismaël Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), a “fabricant de films,” literally “manufacturer of films” who, as this strange expression suggests, takes his craft very personally, making movies out of all the pieces of his life. Desplechin immediately captivates the spectator by showing Ismaël’s exciting spy-film-within-a-film first, with all the lyricism and mystery of that genre. Crossfades, slow-motion and orchestra…
Mathieu Amalric has a problem all men would love to have: chose between Charlotte Gainsbourg and Marion Cotillard. But it's not really a choice. Unfortunately, the film doesn't explore this dilemma as much as it could have.
Amalric becomes crazy, or is he? He's remembering the people from his past. And what is it that makes them run away? We might never know, because we aren't let in on that secret. Desplechin takes his time and never rightly gives us anything that's ultimately satisfying. That is a shame as I loved My Golden Days and had high expectations for this one.
Vegan alert:
Mathieu Amalric's Ismael raises his own chickens and uses their eggs for his cooking.
I literally knew nothing about this going in other than Arnaud Desplechin directed it, so you can imagine how happy I was to see Marion Cotillard show up a half hour in.
No man in the cinema has bigger, wilder eyes than Mathieu Amalric.
Desplechin has yet to make a film that isn't sprawling, messy, excessive, and imperfect. I love him all the more for it.
Cannes film No. 1
What a mess and an absolute waste of fabulous actors!
Les Fantômes D'Ismaël is incredibly choppy to a degree that it becomes frustrating to watch. Every time an emotional scene occurs it is cut away almost immediately, so getting emotionally infested in the story is almost not even impossible.
But then the rest of the film also just stutters forward with seemingly random snippets of useless information. I have heard that there is a long cut which should explain these scenes, but since this film is already overly long I definitely don' think anything would improve from it.
Though I do want to say that Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg are just as great as always, they are unfortunately in a slog of a film that even they can't help to make more enjoyable.
fuckin' tie me up and scream at me when i refuse to finish my writing pls!!
so i think i liked this... this coming from someone who hated my golden days, btw. it unravels a fucking lot, but i enjoyed being "surprised bitch"ed by arnaud desplechin. and anyhow marion cotillard dancing to bob dylan is quite a delight -- and she's not even the **one to watch** here, surprisingly.
(director's cut.)
NYFF 2017.
Watched what is apparently the ‘Director’s Cut’ of the film, and found it to be a tireless, unjustifiably convoluted slog. The initial promise of a complicated and mournful love triangle between Amalric, Gainsbourg and Cotillard gives way to other parallel plot lines that at first distract, and then overtake, but are never anywhere near as interesting. By the end it’s just a horrendously tedious mess, making me wonder how on earth this landed on my watchlist in the first place.
