Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017)

Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017)

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Louis Garrel, Alba Rohrwacher, Lászlo Szabó, Hippolyte Girardot, Jacques Nolot, Catherine Mouchet, Samir Guesmi. Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin, Julie Peyr, Léa Mysius. Cinematography: Irina Lubtchansky. Production design: Toma Baqueni. Film editing: Laurence Briaud. Music: Grégoire Hetzel, Mike Kourtzer.

Even people who know Arnaud Despechin's films better than I do seem to agree that Ismael's Ghosts is something of a mess, a series of scenes and incidents that are sometimes brilliant in themselves -- such as the tantrum that the elderly film director Henri Bloom (Lászlo Szabó) throws while boarding a flight to Israel, where he's to receive an award -- but don't cohere enough to make thematic or emotional sense. Just the fact that we have characters named Bloom and Dedalus should be enough to clue us in that we're dealing with a literary imagination as well as a cinematic one: There's also the reappearance of a woman though to be dead whose name is Carlotta, an allusion to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). As we sort out the various relationships -- who's married or related to whom -- we also have to figure out what one segment has to do with another -- why, for example, do we sometimes seem to be in the middle of a spy thriller and the next we're examining the love life of a filmmaker? Eventually, we realize that some scenes are from the film Ismaël Vuillard is directing, but what that film has to do with his domestic and creative troubles is another matter. Nevertheless, it's entertaining enough to watch actors like Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard, and Charlotte Gainsbourg do their thing, so if in the end you don't particularly feel compelled to piece it all together, there's still been some well-spent time.