Tropic Sprockets / Ismael’s Ghosts
By Ian Brockway
Arnaud Desplechin delivers a magnetic haunting albeit confused portrait of an auteur in “Ismael’s Ghosts.” The film bears a resemblance to The work of Roman Polanski: an anguished director is obsessed by the memory of a lost love. The movement and rhythm of the camera is near virtuosic. The score recalls the bass notes of a feverish thrumming by Bernard Herrmann. Only the seemingly endless flashbacks hinder the film and cause it to drag. Yet even with this reservation, it is often impossible to look away.
Ismael (Mathieu Amaric) is the man who lives with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg) his astronomer girlfriend. One night Ishmael cannot sleep, thinking of his love Carlotta who was presumed dead 21 years before. This is a reference to Hitchcock‘s “Vertigo” which also featured a mysterious Carlotta. After a meeting with Carlotta’s father (Laslo Szabo), Carlotta (Marion Cotillard) appears to him passively. First Ismael is shocked, then he is incredulous and outraged. Carlotta is non-plussed.
There are several subplots including Ismael’s nonchalant brother (Louis Garrel), his harried producer Zwy (Hippolyte Giradot), and Ismael’s mentor and friend Claverie (Jacques Nolot). All of the story lines intersect and become as messy as Ismael in his apartment. Despite all of the vexing turns, the actors Gainsbourgh and Cotillard are excellent and hold the story together, though we are never quite sure just who Carlotta is or whether she is real.
Things get hairy for Ismael; he becomes an insomniac. At times he seems like Jesus torn by Temptation pushed in the middle of Mary Magdalene and The Devil. Ismael is tortured by the idea of being unable to love, write or sleep, he waits in the perpetual fear of abandonment. There is also an influence of German expressionism here; both Carlotta and Sylvia could be figures in a painting by Edvard Munch as sunken eyes peer out from under thick voluptuous hair.
This film is not for the casual watcher; at over two hours (given the folds of the story) it is a commitment. But if one exercises patience, both Gainsbourgh and Cotillard are equally mesmerizing as either devil or angel and it is often hard to tell which is which. “Ismael’s Ghosts” is refreshing and original. Compelling and full of the odd, its eccentricity far outweighs the stumble of a knotty plot.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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