Cannes Dispatch #1: Ismael’s Ghosts, Loveless, Wonderstruck
It’s fitting that the Cannes film festival, presently celebrating its 70th incarnation, would choose to open this edition of shameless and unbridled self-reflexivity with a film that does the same. Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, is pure, saturated Desplechin (at least when he isn’t tipping his cap to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Vertigo), perhaps to a fault. Detailing a years-spanning love triangle set to its maker’s characteristic whip-pan rhythm, this is a vision so consciously expressive and overloaded with formal decoration (time jumps, iris-ins, rear-projection montage, direct address to camera and so on) that it finds itself explicitly likening its manically layered […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2017