“Ismael’s Ghosts”– Movie Review

On the final weekend of The 55th New York Film Festival, I attended a screening of the new drama, “Ismael’s Ghosts” directed by Arnaud Desplechin and starring Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg. 

Synopsis

When a filmmaker is visited by the wife he believed dead, how will this impact both his work and his relationship with his girlfriend?

Story

Ismael (Mathieu Amalric) is working furiously to complete his screenplay but is dogged by his former father-in-law Henri (László Szabó), who’s still obsessing over his daughter Carlotta.  She was married to Ismael but suddenly disappeared; when they never heard from her and the police failed to recover a body, Ismael and Henri had no choice but to have a court declare her as legally dead after a period of years.  While Ismael has made an attempt to move on with his life with Sylvia (Gainsbourg), his girlfriend of the past couple of years, Henri is having much more difficulty doing so.

While at Ismael’s beach house, Sylvia is enjoying the idyllic serenity while Ismael largely spends his time indoors working.  One day, Sylvia is approached by a woman (Cotillard) who claims to be Carlotta, Ismael’s wife.  Startled, Sylvia seems convinced, so she takes the woman to see Ismael, who is similarly taken aback.  With no place to stay, they invite Carlotta to stay at the house.  Soon, tensions erupt; Ismael is furious at Carlotta both for leaving and returning – she has not only ruined his life once, but twice.  Sylvia is also understandably upset; with Carlotta back in the picture, she fears that the once-missing wife will now try to reclaim what she feels is her rightful place.

Unable to take it any longer, Sylvia leaves, deciding to instead completely throw herself into her work as an astrophysicist in order to forget the terrible experience she was forced to endure.  With Sylvia out of the way, Carlotta seizes this opportunity to get Ismael back.  In his mind, Carlotta is no more; he no longer considers her his wife.  He returns to Paris to work on his film, advising Carlotta to mend fences with Henri.  But with all of this turbulence in his life, Ismael can’t concentrate on his film.  When his producer discovers the problem is that Ismael misses Sylvia, can he somehow find a way to reconcile them so that Ismael can finish the film?      

Review

Some French films are more French than others and “Ismael’s Ghosts” is very French – but it also feels very Hitchcockian as well in some ways.  The mystery behind why Carlotta left and why she returned gets solved assuming you believe her explanations – as an audience, we are forced to take them at face value because there’s no evidence otherwise.  Whether or not you buy into the reasons is almost irrelevant because the story seems more concerned about how well or badly an artist deals with diversions resulting from tumultuous experiences in his life while he tries desperately to focus on creating his work.  

One criticism is that the movie feels as though it derails a bit early in the third act, after Sylvia leaves and Ismael returns to Paris.  Viewing this portion of “Ismael’s Ghosts”, one gets the sense as though both Ismael and the motion picture itself have gone rather insane because both appear scattered all over the place and the film seems to lose its narrative thread.  It takes quite some time before the picture appears to get back on track again.  Thankfully, once the character and the work itself return to its senses, it wraps up with a very endearing and satisfying resolution that ultimately rewards the audience after an unsettling experience. 

Following the screening, there was a question and answer session with Desplechin and Mathieu Amalric.  For Desplechin, “Ismael’s Ghosts” is a story about people’s last chances in life.  He further concedes that this is something of a roman à clef  in the sense that a part of him really does want to get out of the filmmaking profession at some point.  Desplechin says he made very deliberate choices in terms of the music used in “Ismael’s Ghosts”; the music changes stylistically depending on whose story is being told at any given moment.  (Particularly amusing was Cotillard’s character dancing to an old Bob Dylan recording)