Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, My Golden Days) is one of my favorite living directors, but this is a rare misfire for him. The film simply (or not so simply) escapes his control and becomes an unwieldy beast. There is a seed of an interesting melodrama involving three titans of modern French acting: Mathieu Amalric is an unstable Parisian film director haunted by the unsolved vanishing of his wife two decades ago, and his promising romance with a new girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is upended when his wife reappears (in the form of Marion Cotillard). But Desplechin's tendency toward nesting-doll structural complexity and fanciful tangents serves him poorly this time around: a film-within-a-film is bizarrely incorporated and, as far as I can tell, utterly pointless, and the film's interminable second and third acts busily squander any interest or tension generated by the first.

Any movie with Marion Cotillard is usually worth watching, but this one just didn't really work on many levels.