Critics reviews

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.

From Pillow Talk split screen moments, to stylised white-canvas stage settings, it works as the cinematic representation of a fractured writer’s notebook.

The film comes off not as a footnote to Roth’s life story but as a gloss on the male directors of the French cinema who develop their movies on the basis of their real-life romantic relationships. In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.

“Deception” is a strange, stifling but frequently intriguing attempt to find a cinematic match for the literary voice of Philip Roth, from his autofictional 1990 novel of the same name. It often succeeds, which is to say the filmmaking often appropriates the self-aggrandizing indulgences and knowingly oppressive masculinity of a work that isn’t among the author’s finest.

The disappointment of this film is that Desplechin can’t quite replicate how powerful the “twist” is in the novel, leaving the movie feeling a bit unsatisfying as it closes, although the final shot is poetic.

The real deception at play here is for anyone who may have watched in hopes of finding a considered treatment of human lives and is instead left with one man’s tired solipsism.

Desplechin has resurrected a dinosaur of a project that is anything but current when it comes to its sexual politics. But even putting that aside, it’s the story of a character who’s self-obsessed and self-important, sleeping with someone who mirrors all that back to him — which, after an hour or so, isn’t all that interesting.

Still, apart from his signature irising, I'm not sure I detected much of a personal stamp. "Deception" is nevertheless uncommonly elegant as Roth film adaptations go, even if they probably shouldn't be attempted at all.

[The film] is just unbearable – like being condescendingly simpered at for an hour and a half: a film full of people smiling knowingly and laughing delightedly at each other’s not-especially-funny-or-interesting remarks, and it’s all the more insufferable for things the film gets fundamentally and structurally wrong.

Like a beltway surrounding its hero’s bloviating ego trips and massive libido, the film keeps turning in circles around a subject that’s only truly interesting if you’re Philip himself.

A pretentious adaptation that totally reduces all of its female characters to suffering, irrational women who look to a man to be saved. Seydoux’s performance is sparkling, as always, but even that can’t salvage a vapid script and the overbearing misogyny.

[A] form of chamber theatre made constantly engaging through camera placement..., shifting lighting, splendid editing and recognisable actors who melt into their roles.