Ismael’s Ghosts Cert: 15A; Now showing, IFI

The old rule of “write what you know” regularly results in texts about down-on-their luck writers coming unstuck (Adaptation, Wonder Boys), suffering bad writer’s block (The Shining), or, well, embracing wine and women as frankly unfeasibly cool bon vivants (The Great Beauty, The Rum Diary).

Ismael’s Ghosts goes for this last iteration — Mathieu Amalric as the Ismael of the title, a rakish, chain-smoking scribe and filmmaker — and pits the protagonist in a hellish existential vortex where Charlotte Gainsbourg and Marion Cotillard vie doggedly for his affections. The former plays partner Sylvia, while the latter is Carlotta, his long-missing wife who has miraculously turned up out of the blue after 20 years.

All the while, Ismael is trying to prepare to begin shooting his latest film, a biopic of his mysterious brother.

If this all sounds particularly self-indulgent (even for a film about a writer), bear in mind that it also takes place over two chaotic hours that lurch between poetic whimsy, vague flashback, Joycean references, and shrill, chaotic departures into the wild throes of romantic torment.

Put another way, Arnaud Desplechin’s latest is hard work. With no discernible axis on which to see things turn and a refusal to ground the narrative in a place where characters behave slightly recognisably to the real world, there is nothing to hold on to throughout this preposterous, contrived outing. A waste of three mighty Gallic leading actors, too.