Toward the end of Arnaud Desplechin’s “Ismael’s Ghosts,” an actress character declares that a film director is “all over the film,” and that certainly seems to be the case for Desplechin himself. The personal nature of “Ismael’s Ghosts” is tangible in every frame: Ismael, the film’s protagonist played by Mathieu Amalric, shares Desplechin’s obsessions with death, women, and obsession itself. And like Desplechin, Ismael is a filmmaker.
“Ismael’s Ghosts” opens with a brief snippet of Ismaël’s latest film, a political thriller starring Louis Garrel as a mysterious French diplomat. While this sort of thing is outside Desplechin’s arty-French wheelhouse, he crafts a believably pulse-pounding film-within-a-film, establishing Ismaël as a director with actual talent.
It’s essential that the audience believes in Ismaël’s filmmaking skill, given that he becomes increasingly insufferable as the film progresses. In Desplechin’s film (as well as in real life), actual talent does excuse some level of insufferability. When we first meet Ismaël, he’s a tortured widower: his wife disappeared twenty years ago and is long since presumed dead. Ismaël regularly visits his father-in-law, an esteemed documentarian played by László Szabó; the two men bond over their shared love of film and Ismaël’s dead wife.
In the years after his wife’s presumed-death, Ismaël meets and falls in love with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg). But while he “moves on” from his dead wife in the traditional sense, he’s still dogged by dreams of her on a nightly basis.
As it turns out, Ismaël’s wife is not dead. She shows up, in the form of Marion Cotillard, while Ismaël and Sylvia are enjoying a day at Ismaël’s beach house. She explains, to a stunned Ismaël and an apathetic Sylvia, that she simply couldn’t handle her mundane life with Ismaël twenty years ago, so she fled to India where she got married and had a brand-new life all to herself. After the recent death of her India-based husband, she decided to move back to France and attempt to reintegrate herself into Ismaël’s life.
The next half-hour or so of “Ismael’s Ghosts” is made up of Cotillard, Gainsbourg, and Amalric arguing with one another about their relationships. Desplechin’s dialogue is a distinctly European flavor of overwrought, characters declare their innermost emotions in long, melancholy monologues; they throw things and push each other and drink and get naked. In the film’s best (and most inexplicable) scene, Cotillard dances wildly to Bob Dylan music as Gainsbourg looks on mournfully.
There’s a dreamlike quality to the film’s middle section that can be attributed to Desplechin’s eccentric editing choices: said dialogue scenes carry Desplechin’s unique visual stylizations, the most obvious being his propensity for crossdisolving from shot to shot within the same scene. It’s all the more jarring when the film shifts into its final stretch, which is almost entirely about Ismaël’s current film project.
The fallout of his wife’s return leaves Ismaël sad and alone, holed up in his house, refusing to come to set. The line producer shows up at Ismaël’s house to convince him to finish his film, Ismaël refuses, and—in Desplechin’s lowest moment—pulls a gun on him. The gun eventually goes off (as all film guns must), introducing a whole new level of outrageous melodrama to the proceedings. This final stretch is far less engaging than what precedes it, due largely to the distinct lack of Cotillard and Gainsbourg. Amalric’s performance becomes intensely manic and unreal as the film nears its conclusion, finally teetering on the edge of caricature. Desplechin’s finale drains “Ismael’s Ghosts” of its authentic Auteurist French Cinema air.
Amalric’s performance is grating throughout. Ismaël is never a particularly pleasant character, but by the time the film is over he is entirely unbearable. Amalric is good at the whole “narcissistic asshole with a heart” thing (particularly in the recent “The Son of Joseph”), but putting him at the center of an egregiously long melodrama is a bit much.
Cotillard and Gainsbourg are, unsurprisingly, excellent. The former brings a wild eccentricity to what is an oddly small role; the latter believably falls in love with Ismaël on-screen, a substantial accomplishment considering the fact that he is mildly intolerable. Szabó is great as Ismaël’s father-in-law; one of the film’s best scenes has him rebelling against an airline’s strict no-personal-beverage policy to humorous effect.
Just as Ismaël’s insufferability can be excused by his genuine talent, so can Desplechin’s. The first two acts of “Ismael” are satisfying enough to excuse its shark-jumping third. While Desplechin’s new film isn’t great by a long stretch, it does manage to thoroughly scratch a very particular Franco-cine-phile itch. And this hardly needs to be said, but for longtime fans of Desplechin, “Ismael’s Ghosts” is a must-see. [B-]