Les Fantômes d'Ismaël
Ismael's Ghosts
Mathieu Amalric in his seventh collaboration with Desplechin, gets to play a director from Roubaix, the hometown of Arnaud Desplechin himself. He is the titular Ismaël, who’s preparing a new feature and who’s been in an apparently quite happy relationship with the astrophysicist Sylvia for about two years when we finally meet them in the film’s contemporary strand.
Another figure presents itself in the form of the narrative’s most literal ghost: the ominously named Carlotta (an innuendo to Hitchcock). She was Ismaël’s first great love some two decades earlier, then disappeared without a trace. When Carlotta suddenly shows up at Ismaël’s beach cottage, it’s not surprising that Sylvia looks like she’s seen a ghost.
LES FANTÔMES D’ISMAËL is a dense maze of a narrative that nimbly hops back and forth between different locations and countries, between the past and the present and between stories and stories within stories. (Boyd van Hoeij)
In the presence of Arnaud Desplechin.
- Mathieu Amalric - Ismaël
- Charlotte Gainsbourg - Sylvia
- Marion Cotillard - Carlotta
- Louis Garrel - Ivan
- Alba Rohrwacher - Arielle/Faunia
- Hippolyte Girardot - Zwy
- Arnaud Desplechin
- Léa Mysius
- Julie Peyr
- Irina Lubtchansky
- Nicolas Cantin
- Grégoire Hetzel
- Toma Baqueni
Wild Bunch