Ismael's Ghosts

As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in Ismael’s Ghosts, but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken.

The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.

A particularly strong element is the story of Carlotta’s father, played with arresting intensity by Laszlo Szabo.

There’s no way around it: The whole, here, is a mess. Even with the extra minutes, the film seems unfinished, the connections among its disparate scenarios vague and arbitrary. But outside of the espionage-movie and poor-lonely-director-dude-can’t-stop-getting-laid interludes, many of those scenarios unsettle, provoke (intentional) laughter, or prove engrossing, especially in their doublings and mysteries.

This director's cut might smack of self-indulgence, but it also says much about love and loss and the language of an artform that flirts with realism while remaining an illusion.

Did Desplechin get seduced by the problems that plague filmmakers like himself? If so, he’s done a disservice to his own work, which needed a solution to its deficiencies—not an extended reverie that merely highlights them. [Cannes Version]

It isn't that it's hard going: it simply can't decide what it wants to be. [Cannes Version]