The latest in Arnaud Desplechin’s overwrought oeuvre features plenty of film-making elan but not one line of plausible dialogue
Arnaud Desplechin has once again wheeled his bizarre sweet trolley into the Cannes restaurant: another clotted confection of tragi-romantic-comic gibberish. Desplechin is a Cannes fixture and his weirdly indulgent jeux d’esprit certainly give the competition a flavour of sorts. But this is exasperatingly nonsensical and humourless: it is full of grand gestures, gigantically self-important acting, big scenes (though often bafflingly truncated), big emotions and smirkingly knowing dialogue. Yet I admit there is technique and gusto to the way it is put together.
The story is about a brother and sister who hate each other. And why exactly? Well, it’s not entirely clear, and if the point is that sibling tension often isn’t explicable – well, that idea also isn’t clear. Marion Cotillard is Alice, a hugely famous stage star who is performing in an adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead. Her brother Louis (Melvil Poupaud) is a celebrated author who is insufferably conceited in ways Desplechin presumably did not intend. There is a third sibling, who hardly features, and Alice has a husband and a child from whom she seems weirdly detached.
