“For its 70th anniversary,” begins Boyd van Hoeij in the Hollywood Reporter, “the Cannes Film Festival has, very appropriately, chosen to open with a film by French auteur Arnaud Desplechin, a Cannes discovery whose feature debut, The Sentinel, played in competition exactly twenty-five years ago. And it is not only the festival that seems to be looking back, as the director’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts (Les fantômes d’Ismaël), feels like an attempt to forge a—modestly scaled, certainly—magnum opus of sorts, a narrative that is not necessarily fully comprehensible as a stand-alone item but which takes great pleasure in playing with all of the writer-director’s obsessions, themes and styles.”
At the Playlist, Jessica Kiang suggests that “Desplechin is a prolific but uneven filmmaker: his last Cannes title, My Golden Days, was a delight; his previous feature, Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, was a meandering indulgence. Ismael’s Ghosts is a curiously, in-the-moment watchable amalgam of all his best and worst tendencies: a film of so many different personalities it feels like several different films inexplicably spliced together.”
But for Screen’s Lisa Nesselson, Ismael’s Ghosts “exudes the lived-in familiarity of a director who knows his characters inside out and the daring and panache of a creator whose creations are still full of surprises, even for him. If you’re going to name a protagonist Carlotta and help yourself to some Bernard Hermann music, you’d better be out to entertain with a sure hand. Desplechin delivers with flying colors thanks to an excellent cast and a sometimes serious, sometimes funny story that never lets up or becomes predictable.”
“A self-absorbed, nightmare-besotted director (played by Mathieu Amalric) is literally haunted by his past when his wife, presumed dead for 21 years, unexpectedly reappears midway through his latest production,” explains Variety’s Peter Debruge, who’s far less impressed: “As phony emotional showcases go, this one’s full of unintentionally comedic melodrama, rivaling cult favorite The Room at times as Amalric (reprising his role as the chronically unstable Ismael Vuillard from Kings and Queen) overturns furniture and heatedly berates Marion Cotillard (as the wife who walked out on him) before making sweaty love to her. Meanwhile, in another storyline, Ismael courts, then abandons, then ultimately impregnates his new flame, Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), described as an astrophysicist with her ‘head in the stars,’ all while struggling to make what comes across as world’s least interesting spy movie.”
That spy movie focuses on Ivan, played by Louis Garrel. At the A.V. Club, A. A. Dowd finds that “the film gradually drifts away from its central love triangle, disappearing into more scenes from the film-within-a-film and exploring Ismaël’s tortured creative process. To say that Desplechin loses the thread would only be partially accurate. It’s more like he lights the thread on fire like a fuse. Thing is, digressions have always been a key tenet of this particular filmmaker’s messy, side-winding, novelistic work. Given the potential charge of the central story, it’s a little disappointing to see Ismael’s Ghosts careen off in several divergent directions. But the deluge of flashbacks and anecdotal asides are part of what make Desplechin’s movies, at their cluttered best, so singularly delightful.”
“This is an unfinished doodle of a film,” finds the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “a madly self-indulgent jeu d’esprit without substance: a sketch, or jumble of sketches, a ragbag of half-cooked ideas for other movie projects, I suspect, that the director has attempt to salvage and jam together.”
Jada Yuan for Vulture: “Whatever faults the rest of the film has (it’s essentially four movies: the love triangle, the fast-paced spy thriller that Ismaël is shooting, the behind the scenes of Ismaël’s nervous breakdown during production, and some meta nonsense) the parts with Cotillard and Gainsbourg are the perfect embodiment of the French values that won out in the recent election. Empathy. Acceptance. Lack of judgment. The belief in the inherent goodness of people, and the need to let them make their own decisions. The two actresses have never been in a film together, but they cede the floor to one another with a mutual respect, just bringing it in every scene.”
“Amalric’s longstanding affiliation with Desplechin is one of those elegantly in-step actor-director relationships that brings out the best in both parties,” finds the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, “and when the film spins off in another unexpected direction, sidelining both women to focus on Ismael’s clashes with his producer Zwy (Hippolyte Girardot), the actor takes his character’s breakdown to comically manic extremes—while the film he’s supposed to be working on also plays out on screen, seemingly blithely unaware of its creator’s torment.”
For Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa, this is a “patchwork where the filmmaker’s exegeses meet a thousand references to his previous films that he, nevertheless, enlivens with a new spirit—more entertaining, sometimes even ‘comic,’ a sort of distanced viewing of the clash between the darkness of human force fields and the feelings that he has always excelled in portraying through instinctive bursts that shatter through the intellectuality of his cinema.”
Reviewing Ismael’s Ghosts in Spanish: Mónica Delgado (desistfilm) and Diego Lerer.
There are two cuts of the film, by the way, one twenty minutes longer than the other. As Ramin Setoodeh reports for Variety, “Magnolia Pictures, which is distributing the film in the United States, still hasn’t decided which version to show.”
from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2pLvYGc
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