Ismael’s Ghosts
classified 15 SPlease note: This was screened in June 2018
Arnaud Desplechin’s latest film follows a filmmaker whose life is turned upside down when his first wife, who had disappeared without a trace some two decades previously, suddenly reappears.
Ismael (Mathieu Amalric) is a film director who describes himself as a widower - his first wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard) disappeared mysteriously twenty years earlier. About to start shooting his new film and now in a relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), their lives are sent into a tailspin when Carlotta returns unannounced and Ismael must choose between the two...
A brilliant shape-shifting film - part farce, part melodrama - it is a sophisticated and surprising musing on the true nature of memory and the past, and whether we can ever truly outrun that which lies therein...