«Les Fantômes d'Ismaël» or the past that catches up with us

Cinema Wednesdays - Loris S. Musumeci

«Don't be jealous of ghosts, darling.»

Twenty-one years, eight months and six days since Carlotta (Marion Cotillard) disappeared. Her husband, Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric), soaks his unfulfilled grief in alcohol. Her father, Monsieur Bloom (Laszlo Szabo), lives in constant horror at the thought of seeing his daughter everywhere. And then she rises from the dead, serene. «I left alone. I don't know why.»

She appears on a sunny afternoon, on a limpid beach in Brittany. But it's been two years since Ismaël embarked on a clumsy path of reconstruction. He has met Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), an austere, motherly astrophysicist. The ghost, imposing itself with a naive, wounded impulse, triangulates the love affair.

The melodrama, with its psychological and comedic tendencies, doesn't stop there. One story interweaves with another. Ever more incomplete and suspended. In fact, it's in another plane of reality that The Ghosts of Ishmael. Quai d'Orsay, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here we meet the mysterious Ivan Dédalus (Louis Garrel), the main character in the thriller Ismaël is struggling to direct. The author and his Ivan suffer from the same disease that inflicts terrible nightmares every night: Eleseneur syndrome.

Arnaud Desplechin's new film is all about nightmares, family, filiation, regrets and dependencies, and the passage of time. The film opened the Cannes Festival, albeit out of competition. It undoubtedly owes its success to its «film d'auteur» genre.

It's a success, immersing the viewer in a very down-to-earth world, with its banal characters lost in events beyond their very human frailty. It's also a world of dreamlike confusion between fiction and reality. Finally, a theatrical world of poetic and novelistic recitation that invokes Rilke, transfiguring everyday life into a tragedy of the past that catches up with us.

«Absent. And that didn't soothe anything.»

Write to the author: loris.musumeci@leregardlibre.com

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