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There’s a lot going in Arnaud Desplechin’s Brother and Sister - perhaps a tad too much for its own good never mind the question of testing audience endurance.

The heart of the matter revolves around two warring siblings Alice and Louis, played by the ever watchable Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud, and their extended family members.

Even within the first quarter of hour the pair have a face-off over the death of a six-year-old child (Louis’s son) during a family mourning while an elderly couple) become involved in a cleverly staged multiple pile-up on a country road as they were driving to Lille for the opening night of actress Alice’s new stage production, a James Joyce adaptation.

The basis of the mutual loathing between the pair is never fully explained although it’s hinted at: Louis is a writer who used one of...

Whatever other flaws “Brother and Sister” may have, you absolutely cannot accuse it of being slow to build. Within its first 10 minutes, two estranged siblings bawl each other out at a dead child’s wake, one declaring the other “an indecent monster”; a screechingly staged single-vehicle car crash imperils an elderly couple and paralyzes a teenage driver; then, a barrelling truck at the scene brings further tragedy. Even before we’ve had time to gather the principals’ names, French director Arnaud Desplechin’s latest dysfunctional family tableau makes no bones about its dialed-to-11 melodramatic agenda; that attention-grabbing intensity soon dissipates, however, in the gauzy, maudlin study of toxic sibling relations that ensues. Marion Cotillard’s headlining presence may pique international interest in a talky piece likely to play better on home turf.

The outward signs were promising for Desplechin’s swift follow-up to his stuffy Philip Roth adaptation “Deception,” which...