Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Year Released: 2017
Rating: 1.0
Filmmaker Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric), whose wife Carlotta (Marion Cotillard) went missing twenty years ago, has her pop up into his life after she slept around the world - this plunges him face first into madness, affecting his relationship with meek Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and his current movie project, which has something to do with spies and Russians and Louis Garrel. Desplechin, not exactly known for his brevity, crunches together too many narratives and they all suffer because of it: not content in just doing a love triangle, it has flashbacks to the beginning of Amalric and Cotillard's marriage, gets into Cotillard's father's filmmaking career (and his rant on a plane), reveals Amalric's troubles with his producer (he shoots him), brings up Amalric's "long lost brother" (that he claims is dead) and so on ... by the end it nearly forgets about what's going on between Amalric and Cotillard and ends with Gainsbourg addressing the camera directly to "wrap it up" since it couldn't do that naturally. It's hard to show disdain for a film with a cast this talented, but my goodness is it disjointed.
