Sibyl (2019)

Justine Triet's Sibyl concerns a psychotherapist who abandons her patients for the novel she has long meant to write, then discovers that one patient, a fretful actress named Margot, makes better material than any fiction. The film is a comedy of professional bad behavior, and it takes a certain pleasure in watching its heroine behave badly. A woman directs it. A woman co-wrote it, alongside Arthur Harari. A woman carries nearly every scene. That configuration grants the picture a mild feminist character, the kind that arrives by default when the camera stays fixed on a complicated woman and declines to apologize for her. There is no program attached.

Nor is there much else of the contemporary cultural furniture. The cast is a white French ensemble, assembled on conventional grounds. Race never enters the frame as a subject. Neither does climate, nor class grievance, nor the body as a political site, nor the vocabulary of neurodivergence, though the heroine spends her working life inside other people's heads. The film is set in Paris, on a film shoot, and briefly on Stromboli, and its concerns are adultery, ambition, abortion, and the slow erosion of a woman's self-control. These are old materials. Triet handles them without a thesis.

The result is a morally ambiguous drama that trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions, which is to say it does not lecture. Characters drink too much and lie too readily, and the film simply watches. For a critic employed in the classification of such things, this is a quiet evening. The vintage is dry, well made, faintly sour. Nothing in it demands our approval, and nothing in it asks us to vote.