This impish game is five films in one
Ismael’s Ghosts Cert tbc, 110 min
Dir Arnaud Desplechin Starring Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marion Cotillard, Louis Garrel, Alba Rohrwacher, László Szabó, Hippolyte Girardot
Ivan Dedalus is the name on everyone’s lips at the start of the new film from Arnaud Desplechin. A mysterious government agent prone to naps and played by Louis Garrel, his forename has the French pronunciation Ee-van, to rhyme with Stephen – so the nod to James Joyce’s own authorial alter ego is surely intentional, and also the various Dedaluses of Desplechin films past.
Ivan is one of Ismael’s ghosts, which is to say he’s a fictional character created by Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric): the central figure in the opening film at Cannes this year, a dense and noodly crypto-farce in which a director struggles to complete his latest opus while his own life crumbles into a kind of mad art-cinema clip reel.
The catalyst for Ismael’s breakdown is the reappearance of his wife, Carlotta (Marion Cotillard), who vanished 21 years ago in murky circumstances. She rematerialises on a beach where Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), an astrophysicist and Ismael’s new partner of two years, is sunbathing. Not knowing what else to do, Sylvia leads Carlotta back to Ismael’s house, where her arrival plays out like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca turned inside out. It’s as if the first Mrs de Winter has turned up on the doorstep at Manderley in a puddle of brine and seaweed.
Desplechin stages this reunion as a haunting, and his three leads play it to prickling perfection: confusion and horror flicker across Gainsbourg and Amalric’s respective faces, while Cotillard smiles so enigmatically, her slight frame – made slighter still by an unnerving high camera angle – seems weirdly like a threat. Carlotta’s name recalls another of Hitchcock’s own ghosts, from Vertigo – but while she’s unquestionably flesh and blood, she retains a sway over Ismael that borders on possession. In a weird, indelible sequence, she dances, smiling broadly, to Bob Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe while Sylvia looks on from a deckchair, perhaps fathoming if this woman really is who she claims.
It’s best just to go along with the film’s breezy supposition that either of these women would fall for Ismael in the first place. Amalric transcends mere dishevelment here: in some scenes which flash back to the start of his relationship with Sylvia, the former Bond villain looks like a pile of leaves with a coat thrown on top. When he and Sylvia meet, in a scene that dances with real romantic chemistry, she teasingly suggests that he has no chance with her because she prefers married men: the cosmic joke at their expense being that Ismael still unwittingly is one.
Amalric’s longstanding affiliation with Desplechin is one of those elegantly in-step actor-director relationships that brings out the best in both parties – 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.
Zwy’s bellowed order to Ismael to “just finish your film!” may chime with less patient members of the audience, and the tumble of ideas and tones that Desplechin toys with don’t neatly intermesh. That’s clearly the idea – in telling the story of a man struggling to complete a single movie, Desplechin ostentatiously burns through enough material for five – and there’s often a strange, snappy amusement in feeling yourself mentally settle in for a Polanski-like suspense thriller, a Hitchcockian romantic mystery or a Bergmanesque psychological jigsaw puzzle, only for the film to shoo you out of this comfort zone five minutes later. There’s frustration in it too, in roughly equal measure – the cost of the film’s shapeshifting is that it’s hard to invest in it as anything other than a movie-making game – but for Desplechin’s impish purposes, it’s a price worth paying.