Some Blessings and Curses of Cinephilia
Since I don’t have much investment in parsing Arnaud Desplechin’s arsenal of “personal” references, I had to look elsewhere for the intermittent pleasures of Ismaël’s Ghosts (2017), available on a two-disc Blu-ray from Arrow Films. I often find myself so hard put to navigate Desplechin’s multiple allusions to and borrowings from Philip Roth and Woody Allen (for me, the most overrated and least interesting members of his overstuffed pantheon), much less those from James Joyce, Alfred Hitchcock, Norman Mailer, and Alain Resnais, that I have to forsake any sustained effort to rationalize how these and countless other figures could all belong to the same curious tribe of role models. Maybe this is because Desplechin appears to regard these touchstones as sacred talismans more than as meaningful or helpful artistic influences. Apart from naming László Szabó and Louis Garrel’s characters “Bloom” and “Dedalus,” respectively, it’s difficult to determine how much he’s actually learned or adapted from Ulysses—and when he combines nods to both Ulysses and Vertigo in the name of Marion Cotillard’s character “Carlotta Bloom,” the whole thing begins to seem like the silliest kind of fool’s game. As for Ismaël himself (Mathieu Amalric), is his name supposed to start us thinking about Moby-Dick, the Bible, or maybe both? Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t care.
The two discs are devoted to the 114-minute theatrical version and the 135-minute director’s cut. I watched both, in that order, but had to wait 70 minutes in the latter before I encountered any new material: a sequence explicating yet another Desplechinian reference, according to which Szabó’s Bloom is actually a stand-in for Claude Lanzmann. Otherwise, the longer version is somewhat more coherent (although it doesn’t clarify or justify some of the story’s sketchier side-plots, such as those involving the hero’s adopted son or the heroine’s disabled brother), and in both versions most of the film’s kicks are (1977) in a video interview included as an extra: it’s the sort of reference point that can only make his film seem feeble by comparison, yet he trots it out like a badge of honour.
