The town of Roubaix in France, located near the Belgian border, is rather like the Detroit of France. Yesterday’s city of industry has become a broken shell of a town. In the film's opening as local police chief Inspector Daoud (Roschdy Zem) cruises by a burning car he calls it in, the fire foreshadowing tragedy.Daoud is a fictional character who was added in by director Arnaud Desplechin. His new film is based on a novel

Disappointment, “Ismael’s Ghosts” is not the near-perfect film that “My Golden Days,” which screened at Cannes last year, was. Desplechin’s new film, which launched this year's Cannes Film Festival this morning (Cannes is celebrating seventy this year) is sketchy and brutal and impertinent and camp. It has some grand, theatrical dialogue (and it works well), like its predecessor from last year, memorable lines, like, "I will rip your mask off and make a prince out of you.”

Right after World War II Jimmy Picard (Benicio Del Toro), a Blackfoot Indian who fought in France, is admitted to a military hospital in Topeka, Kansas. The institution is specialized in brain diseases and Jimmy Picard suffers from many problems : dizziness, temporary blindness, and hearing loss (a case of post-traumatic stress disorder?). In the absence of physiological causes, he’s given a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Actor Benicio Del Toro has been attached to appear in [...]