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.

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.

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.

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.

arnaud desplechin's sandy wexler

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.

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.

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.

Brilliant cast. Great filming location. It was almost like two films. However, it came together (while scrutinizing every detail) at the end. Marion Cotillard and Mathieu Almeric really carried the film. Bravo!

A sprawling novelistic film that doesn't feel the need to tie up too many loose ends, but is more interested in moments between the characters. Desplechin riffs on his usual themes about relationships, family, history, mental health, and how all those things fit together. Character names and situations are reused from his other films providing a bit of a metatextual context, but it's loose and I found it enjoyable. Not sure how it compares to the shorter version that screened initially at Cannes, but I settled in and let it wash over me.

内容和类型都非常多，甚至感觉像没有条理地杂糅在一起。有几段还是挺喜欢的，戏中戏以及枪击爆炸舞蹈等等，不过还是无法继续提升整体的感觉。另外现在对展示“影人生活”的题材也有点抵触。

It had a chance to be so good, but it was wrecked with being so confusing and jumping all over the place.

The movie in the movie is a total crap, but I am not sure that the movie outside the movie is much better.

Alas, this is for the shorter version, but even cut to shred this is a masterpiece which hits hard in its sense of pasts haunting. Not just the literal ghost, but even stuff like the Claude Lanzmann on a plane sequence give this effecting sense of how people don't let the present stand alone. What makes this more interesting then the base line theme implies or similar films such as Personal Shopper is that the ghosting is a two way street. The ghosts hide away because they carry the phantom of the ones they are haunting. That can be incredibly funny such as with the diplomat, but also relentlessly tragic such as with Cotillard.

Desplechin's Dolor y Gloria. Es fascinante el torbellino de ideas, pero uno desearía que hubiese elegido solo una de las mil películas que pretende ser (¡y al mismo tiempo!). Una historia de amor contada como si fuese un thriller.

o filme é meio?????? mas gostei

yes i did save your life. i’m jealous of Carlotta... i wanted to drive you crazy, not make you reasonable. 

better title: Cotillard’s Ghosts... i would have resolved the love triangle better than have the filmed finished and more Cotillard.

Cotillard dancing to Dylan’s cover of It Ain’t Me Babe... one of my favorite scenes of all time. ✨💙

Ismael's Ghost would be so much better if it was shorter

Ismael's Ghost is full of pointless scenes that could have easily been cut but for some reason were kept in, all of the scenes involving the characters from Ismael's screenplay were completely pointless and added nothing at all to the film and just felt like they were used to extend the already long run time.

Its annoying because there is a good film in here somewhere, I really enjoyed the plot involving Carlotta coming back after being missing for 20 years which was easily the best part of the film, I think if 45 minutes were cut and the film focused solely on Carlotta disrupting Ismael and Sylvia's relationship then Ismael's Ghost would have been a really good film.

I’m mad at every character in this movie and I don’t even know why.

Caralho que desperdício da porra, a pessoa ter Marion Cotillard e Charlotte Gainsbourg e fazer uma bagunça dessa.