Following up one of his best films in some time, My Golden Days, Arnaud Desplechin is back with Ismael’s Ghosts. Starring Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mathieu Amalric, and Louis Garrel, the film opened Cannes Film Festival last year and now the director’s cut will be arriving in the U.S. next month. Ahead of the release, Magnolia Pictures has now released a new trailer for the story following a filmmaker and the women in his life, one of who reappears as a ghost.
“The story doesn’t just leap back and forth in time; it freely switches between reality and fantasy, and also frequently dives into the film-within-the-film – both as a script being written and as a shoot in progress – which, in turn, has its own flashbacks and recollections,” Giovanni Marchini Camia said in his rave review from Cannes. “Far from mere ostentation or playfulness, this proliferation of narrative layers, each drawing from the recesses of Ismael’s psyche, has a clear purpose: cumulatively and forcefully, it renders the impression of someone assailed by the past to the point of being incapable of functioning within the present.”
See the trailer and poster below.
Ismaël Vuillard makes films. He is in the middle of one about Ivan, an atypical diplomat inspired by his brother. Along with Bloom, his master and father-in-law, Ismaël still mourns the death of Carlotta, twenty years earlier. Yet he has started his life over again with Sylvia. Sylvia is his light. Then Carlotta returns from the dead. Sylvia runs away. Ismaël rejects Carlotta. Driven mad by these ordeals, he abandons the shoot for his family home in Roubaix. There, he lives as a recluse, besieged by his ghosts.
Ismael’s Ghosts opens on March 23 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.