Sibyl (Justine Triet, 2019) (Patreon)

Sadly, thanks to the unmatched global distribution of COVID-19, there will most likely be no 2020 Cannes Film Festival. When you consider that Cannes is essentially the magnetic north of the art film universe, the single point around which any given year's cinematic priorities are organized, it's difficult to imagine the long term repercussions of it simply (or not so simply) not happening. But hey, there's always last year!

Still trying to catch up with 2019's competition slate, with but a handful of titles left to see, it seemed like a good time to discover Justine Triet, a filmmaker who has been making waves in France for a few years now. Her latest, Sibyl, looks poised to be her international breakthough (assuming we don't all die), and indeed it is an interesting cinematic animal -- a kind of "lenticular" film, in the sense that it is either a perverse psychological drama or a jet-black comedy depending on the viewer's own angle of vision. Imagine mid-period Resnais treated as realism, or classic Chabrol played at the feverish pitch of farce.

At its base, Sibyl is about the world's worst psychotherapist, a woman who should print business cards announcing herself as "The Wolfgang Puck of Counter-Transference." Sibyl (Virginie Efira) has just decided to mostly end her private practice so she can return to being a novelist. But she plans to keep a handful of clients, one of whom is a sudden addition to her roster. Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a young actress who is in crisis, having gotten pregnant by Igor (Gaspard Ulliel), the well-known actor with whom she is working on an upcoming film. To make matters worse, Igor is romantically linked in a very public way to Mika (Sandra Hüller), the director of the film.

Sibyl becomes more and more involved in Margot's situation, at first surreptitiously recording their sessions so she can use them as raw material for her novel. But as we learn from Sibyl's sessions with her own therapist, the decidedly non-squiggly Dr. Katz (Arthur Hatari), she is overly invested in Margot's decision of whether or not to abort, because of lingering pain from Sibyl's own similar situation with her ex (Niels Schneider). Before things have hit absolute critical mass, Sibyl is flown out to the film shoot in Stromboli to act as an emotional go-between for Margot, Igor, and Mika, a blurring of lines that doesn't exactly stabilize Sibyl's objectivity.

Sibyl opens with an astonishing shot of Efira and another actor in a conveyor-belt driven luncheonette, with zigzagging diagonals of plates of food moving all around the actors. As it turns out, this shot is deceptive. It's not just that nothing else in Sibyl equals its elegance. Sadly, Trier's craft throughout much of the film is workmanlike and flat. This would be excusable aside from the fact that so much of Sibyl's psychological resonance depends on flashbacks and non-linear time. Triet makes these sideways slips into the past quite legible. But it seems to me that when a film is so reliant on montage, the edits ought to "pop" or somehow signal a temporal rupture in visual and/or sonic terms. In Sibyl, they just kind of lie there, immersed in the overall flow. This made me curious to dip into Triet's earlier films, because I got the odd feeling that perhaps she is primarily a writer for whom cinema itself is but a necessary inconvenience.