I fantasmi d'Ismael

I saw this film up in Cambridge, with a sophisticated crowd and more than half the audience walked out.

I am all for narrative complexity, but pretentiousness and complexity for the sake of complexity is artificial and pompous.

I think the only people who like this film are self conscious lowbrow audience that simply assumes its convolution has some meaning that escaped them, or that throwing in disjointed and out of place ad frankly random surreal elements is somehow a good onto itself.

In the end, despite recruitment of solid acting talent, this is just an amazingly bad film.

The basis for a good film is always a good screenplay. Because the screenplay of 'Les fantômes d'Ismaël' is a mess, the film is a failure. What is undoubtedly meant as an intelligent multi-layered story highlighting the many aspects in the life of a film maker, is in reality an incomprehensible hodgepodge of subplots going nowhere.

Right from the very beginning, the viewer is confused. The first few scenes are not scenes from the film we're watching, but from a film within the film, which is being shot by lead character Ismaël. The main plot item, however, is the return of his wife, who has been missing for 20 years and was presumed dead. This in itself can be fine material for a well-acted drama, exploring the way the husband, his girlfriend and his long lost wife cope with this new situation. With multiple award winning actresses like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Marion Cotillard on hand, this would seem to be the most logical option.

Instead, the viewer is offered a myriad of increasingly complicated side-stories, flash backs and dream-like sequences, culminating in a laughable scene of the tormented film maker shooting his own executive producer by accident. I have no doubt this film tries to make a point, but I'm afraid only the director knows which one. Unless you're a fan of French pseudo-intellectual art-house dramas, this film is to be avoided.

I suppose I'm lucky in the sense that unlike the other reviewers on here, I didn't pay to watch this film in a theater, but streamed it on Hulu. I approached it with high hopes since the title and brief synopsis seemed promising, but as the film went on I would get more and more disappointed. I thought the main character's film and his writing would just remain a side plot rather than eventually consume the whole thing. I was much more interested in learning about this long lost wife and his past relationship with her, but instead the movie just goes a million directions at once. We certainly learn about "les fantomes d'Ismaël" but are still left lost as to why they're there in the first place or why any of them matter more than the plot about the wife ?! Honestly this is a film that even pretentious hipsters won't have the right to say that they understood, because the film is a hot mess. Yes it may have some solid French talent in the cast, but their gifts went to waste due to a tangled storyline that never exactly gets detangled. I'm a fan of French films, but this one is just not good, sorry to say.

Seen at the Viennale 2017: With actresses like Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg you have a winner anyway. Just to look at them acting is worth the movie. Gainsbourg plays the actual girlfriend and Cotillard the wife coming back to her husband after 20 years away. Director Arnaud Desplechin was present at the screening. Asked about choosing Gainsbourg for girlfriend and Cotillard for the back coming wife, he answered, he could have chosen the actresses the other way round, too. For sure it would have become a different movie. I would like to see also this other version. Sadly, it will never be directed...

This film is a stinker. The premise seems interesting enough - a woman disappeared 20 years earlier, the husband and family not sure if she was dead. Other than that, the film goes downhill fast. The plot is boring, and the film jumps around to various sub-plots. The dialog is bad - the characters speak in a way that you shake your head and say "Who speaks like that in real life?" Not sure if it's a translation issue, but this seems to be consistent throughout the movie. It's basically a movie about the dialog, not so much the weak, unbelievable story. You really don't care about the characters. To add to the torture, the movie is over 2 hours long, so the suffering is extended. Avoid it like the plague.