It
is like Day for Night mixed with a
little le Carré, but it is all very Arnaud Desplechin. Ismaël Vuillard (the
protag of Desplechin’s Kings & Queen,
again portrayed by Mathieu Amalric) is supposed to make a movie about notorious
diplomat and possible spy Ivan Dedalus, who certainly sounds related to Paul
Dedalus, a recurring character in three other Desplechin films, also played by
Amalric. Everything is related and possibly everyone is Desplechin in Ismaël’s Ghosts (trailer here), which screens as a Main Slate selection
of the 55th New York Film Festival.
This
is not the version of Ghosts that
garnered Cannes jeers. Instead, we get a “director’s cut” that is
twenty-minutes longer. Frankly, the long version is still pretty confused, but
it must be even harder to follow with pieces carved out. Vulliard is supposed
to be telling the story of Ivan Dedalus, a notorious diplomat and spy from a
working-class background, who ironically was often attached to missions precisely
because he was suspected of dealing with the Russians.
However,
Vulliard’s personal drama keeps getting in the way. Depending on what point
Desplechin flashes back to, the surrogate character is either romancing Sylvia,
the shy astrophysicist, preparing his mentor-father-in-law Henri Bloom for a
retrospective tribute in Israel, or dealing poorly with the sudden reappearance
of his long presumed dead wife Carlotta Bloom. Eventually, the stress gets to
be too much for Vulliard, forcing his long-suffering friend and line producer
Zwy to track him down.
Even
if Desplechin added an additional hour, Ghosts
would probably still be a jumbled, herky-jerky affair. The constant
flashing forwards and backwards can leave your head spinning, but the whole
point is how everything is supposed to be mixed up in Vulliard’s head, so you
just have to roll with it.
In
fact, there is a lot of good stuff in here. Louis Garrel is almost
unrecognizable as the intriguing Ivan Dedalus, so much so, we wouldn’t mind
seeing Desplechin return to his character. Amalric and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s
Sylvia also have some appealingly fresh and mature chemistry together.
Hippolyte Girardot also shows a flair for physical comedy as the poor, put-upon
Zwy. Surprisingly, it is Marion Cotillard’s sequences as Carlotta Bloom (dig
the Vertigo reference) that mostly
muddy up the film.
