Director hopes to skip Cannes criticism
Print Edition
A movie starring two of France’s best known actresses opened the Cannes film festival with its director hopeful it would not be torn apart by the event’s famously hostile pack of critics.
Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg both star with Mathieu Amalric in “Ismael’s Ghosts,” about a filmmaker whose wife disappeared 20 years ago.
Opening the festival is a prestigious spot, but means the film is “hors-concours” — outside the competition, something award-winning director Arnaud Desplechin said was a relief.
“You feel a bit more protected than when you are in competition and it’s also a huge honor,” said Desplechin yesterday.
“I think it’s less perilous than when you are in competition, when often the French press can be more divided, more brutal.”
At a festival where the critics are not afraid to boo a film they dislike, “Ismael’s Ghosts,” moves from spy thriller to melodrama and verges on farce, but seems to be well received.
IndieWire called it “a wild hodgepodge of genres that often risk collapsing on top of each other. At its best, the movie is a freewheeling gambit, hurtling in multiple directions at once, and it’s thrilling to watch Desplechin try juggle them all.”
Hollywood Reporter said it had “a narrative that is not necessarily fully comprehensible ... but which takes great pleasure in playing with all of the writer-director’s obsessions, themes and styles.”
“If the movie is, as co-star Louis Garrel suggested, autobiographical, it would seem that the life of a French moviemaker is full of despair, alcohol and sleepless nights, but also plenty of passion.
The biggest laugh from the audience came when Gainsbourg’s character, Sylvia, is getting to know Ismael and asks: “Do you sleep with your actresses?”
With a nonchalant Gallic shrug, he replies: “Of course.”
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