Sibyl (2019)
Country: FR/BEL
Technical: col/2.39:1 100m
Director: Justine Triet
Cast: Virginie Efira, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Gaspard Ulliel, Sandra Hüller, Niels Schneider, Laure Calamy
Synopsis:
A psychiatrist wanting to return to her first love of writing drops her patients but then becomes involved in a cry for help from an actress who has fallen pregnant by her co-star. While trying to maintain her professional distance she herself suffers from flashbacks to a passionate affair that led to her own first pregnancy, and to complicate her life further she uses the present story to provide fuel for her new novel.
Review:
In this headcase of a movie the director of In Bed with Victoria professed to be toying with the idea that her protagonist uses fiction to reinvent her own life but gets her fingers burnt in the process. Not content with being a healer of the sick, she rejects the most important people in her life and develops an obsessive relationship with her new patient because she sees in her something of herself, as well as the chance to conduct an experiment. When she visits the film set (on Stromboli, of all places; she herself is named after the oracle that sat at Cumae, near Vesuvius), she becomes a cure-all and mediator, before acting first as stand-in, then as director, unleashing a turmoil of passions. The conclusion, that life is fiction because we write it ourselves is perhaps less revelatory than sophistic, but this impossibly frustrating and pretentious subject matter is nevertheless smartly made and acted by its female cast, closing on one of the most poignant child-parent exchanges ever put on film.
Country: FR/BEL
Technical: col/2.39:1 100m
Director: Justine Triet
Cast: Virginie Efira, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Gaspard Ulliel, Sandra Hüller, Niels Schneider, Laure Calamy
Synopsis:
A psychiatrist wanting to return to her first love of writing drops her patients but then becomes involved in a cry for help from an actress who has fallen pregnant by her co-star. While trying to maintain her professional distance she herself suffers from flashbacks to a passionate affair that led to her own first pregnancy, and to complicate her life further she uses the present story to provide fuel for her new novel.
Review:
In this headcase of a movie the director of In Bed with Victoria professed to be toying with the idea that her protagonist uses fiction to reinvent her own life but gets her fingers burnt in the process. Not content with being a healer of the sick, she rejects the most important people in her life and develops an obsessive relationship with her new patient because she sees in her something of herself, as well as the chance to conduct an experiment. When she visits the film set (on Stromboli, of all places; she herself is named after the oracle that sat at Cumae, near Vesuvius), she becomes a cure-all and mediator, before acting first as stand-in, then as director, unleashing a turmoil of passions. The conclusion, that life is fiction because we write it ourselves is perhaps less revelatory than sophistic, but this impossibly frustrating and pretentious subject matter is nevertheless smartly made and acted by its female cast, closing on one of the most poignant child-parent exchanges ever put on film.
Country: FR/BEL
Technical: col/2.39:1 100m
Director: Justine Triet
Cast: Virginie Efira, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Gaspard Ulliel, Sandra Hüller, Niels Schneider, Laure Calamy
Synopsis:
A psychiatrist wanting to return to her first love of writing drops her patients but then becomes involved in a cry for help from an actress who has fallen pregnant by her co-star. While trying to maintain her professional distance she herself suffers from flashbacks to a passionate affair that led to her own first pregnancy, and to complicate her life further she uses the present story to provide fuel for her new novel.
Review:
In this headcase of a movie the director of In Bed with Victoria professed to be toying with the idea that her protagonist uses fiction to reinvent her own life but gets her fingers burnt in the process. Not content with being a healer of the sick, she rejects the most important people in her life and develops an obsessive relationship with her new patient because she sees in her something of herself, as well as the chance to conduct an experiment. When she visits the film set (on Stromboli, of all places; she herself is named after the oracle that sat at Cumae, near Vesuvius), she becomes a cure-all and mediator, before acting first as stand-in, then as director, unleashing a turmoil of passions. The conclusion, that life is fiction because we write it ourselves is perhaps less revelatory than sophistic, but this impossibly frustrating and pretentious subject matter is nevertheless smartly made and acted by its female cast, closing on one of the most poignant child-parent exchanges ever put on film.