InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2023
BROTHER AND SISTER
Arnaud Desplechin
Somewhere along the line, not all that long ago, Arnaud Desplechin ceased to be a marketable
name in the U.S. film biz. While certainly never a properly, consistently lauded figure over here, the
now-62-year-old French auteur and Cannes mainstay has nevertheless found audiences via the
likes of IFC and Magnolia, who put out his last film, Ismael’s Ghost, to get U.S. distribution. That was six years ago now, and in the time
since, Desplechin has released two more features (the misunderstood procedural Oh Mercy! and the pokey, elliptical Philip Roth
adaptation Deception), a television miniseries (En thérapie), and directed (and filmed) a production of Angels in America for
Comédie-Française, though none of these have found their way to American audiences.
It seems excitement has waned for this formerly hip filmmaker, yet little about his approach and voice has changed since his 1996
breakthrough My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, nor has his stable of actors, an elite crew he largely discovered, boasting the
likes of Matthieu Almaric and Marion Cotillard, which makes the disinterest in getting his recent work distributed here all the more
baffling and frustrating. That said, one can imagine the mischievous, purposefully indulgent self-referentialism of Ismael’s Ghost and
its predecessor My Golden Days to be a turn-off for the uninitiated (they both act as pseudo-sequels to my Sex Life...), compounded by
those films’ mean, unemphasized sense of humor and ironic self-critique; the dry dramatics of Oh Mercy! and Deception operated less
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