Deception Review: Arnaud Desplechin Flattens Philip Roth’s Multitudes

Director Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception is an intriguing example of a theoretically loyal film adaptation, rich in obsessive line-by-line quotations, that nevertheless entirely misses the point of its source material. Desplechin and co-screenwriter Julie Peyr tackle Philip Roth’s 1990 book of the same name, which initially appears to be much more approachable for filmmakers to interpret than subsequent Roth monoliths such as American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and, above all, Sabbath’s Theater.

The challenge is usually to wrestle Roth’s thorny, enraged, profane, and socio-politically committed prose onto the screen in ways that contain those multitudes, though it seems that with Deception, which is composed entirely of dialogue, Roth has done most of the work for the potential adaptation. But take a closer look and Deception is revealed to be an elaborate shell game, which Desplechin flattens out into something altogether more ordinary.

The setups of the book and film are similar: a man closely modeled after Roth himself, Philip (Denis Podalydès), engages in a series of often post-coital conversations with an unnamed, much younger English woman (Léa Seydoux) in London in the late 1980s. They discuss a sampling of Roth’s familiar bugaboos, including anti-Semitism and the world’s response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and role-play scenarios that turn on the shifting power dynamics between men and women depending on social status and context, whether they are May-December lovers or a married couple on the verge of implosion.

Though it isn’t among Roth’s better novels, Deception is energized by the ferocity of its gamesmanship and myriad ironies. It’s a sex novel without sex—that’s all between the lines, occurring before and after long scenes of verbal negotiation—just as it’s a novel about a relationship in which a man and woman refuse to define said relationship.

Underneath the gimmicky book’s elaborate rhetorical machinery resides primordial terror: that Philip and his equally damaged lover hold themselves at a distance by hiding behind parlor games. We gradually learn that Philip may be talking to multiple women, many of whom may exist only in a very famous, very lonely married man’s imagination, merging and dividing as he fashions a self-imprisoning hall of mirrors (read: his next novel).

Desplechin keeps the dialogue and annihilates the context, investing the characters’ banalities with unironic passion. Philip is turned into one of Desplechin’s horny, jittery imps, who’s practically electric with untamed feeling, while the woman is a confident ingénue who’s entirely devoid of the uncertainty and doubt of the character in Roth’s novel. These aren’t two austere, guarded intellectuals talking around the idea of sex and marriage and politics, but rather ecstatic lovers who can barely keep their hands off one another. As such, the film’s sex scenes, well-staged and intimate, contradict the very meaning of the original enterprise. Meanwhile, the other women in Philip’s life, deliberately difficult to differentiate in the novel, are shaped into full characters and accorded subplots that are separated neatly from the main narrative via on-screen chapter headings. These alterations leave us with just another film about a supposedly great man using whom he screws as fodder for his work.

Speaking of great men, Podalydès resolutely fails to conjure one. As a Roth admirer, this critic was put off by the actor’s overwhelming neediness to please, a tonal 180 from Roth and the surrogates that surface in his writing. At times, Podalydès’s Philip, perhaps intentionally, invites comparison to Mathieu Amalric’s characters from prior Desplechin films, while lacking the maniacal bite that usually prevents Amalric from getting too cute in a role. Watching Podalydès prance around the various settings fawning over the women in his life, one wonders how anyone could find this desperate cornball intimidating, much less offensive. There’s no way this harmless clown could write the unhinged, authentically daring Sabbath’s Theater. Hell, one’s not even sure that the man could write Fifty Shades of Gray.

It can be unfair to bat a film down with its own source material, but those unfamiliar with the Roth novel may find Desplechin’s Deception baffling and pointless, an agonizingly repetitive and cheesy collection of grand displays of melodramatic passion. Desplechin loses not only Roth’s trickery but his own, as this film has very little of the finely threaded sense of history and familial strife that often flows through his own, more personal work, such as A Christmas Tale and My Golden Days. And Desplechin’s formal gambits—iris shots, sudden setting alterations—only further underscore just how little is actually going on here. With his Deception, Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.