There are few actors who can cry quite like Adèle Exarchopoulos.
The French actress outranks even the likes of renowned sobber Claire Danes. Exarchopoulos heaves silently, her sobs narrowly escaping a growing lump in her throat, her tears gliding down her cheeks and under her chin, where she wipes them away casually mid-soliloquy with the back of her hand.
Her performance in 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour — along with how she ate, kissed and yelled — still echoes in my brain, her mannerisms so real and unaffected. She brings that same innocence to Sibyl, in which she plays a patient of the eponymous psychiatrist, who is played just as engagingly by Virginie Efira (An Impossible Love).
Efira is spellbinding as Sibyl, a psychiatrist keen on getting back to her writerly roots. But when Exarchopoulos’ Margot, a new patient with a wild story, shows up at her office, she can’t resist. Margot is an actress who has become pregnant after an affair with her famous co-star Igor (Gaspard Ulliel), who is married to the film’s director (Sandra Hüller). If that sounds complicated, it only gets more so. Sibyl throws ethics to the wind and begins recording her sessions with Margot on the sly, even going so far as to travel with her to the set and meet the figures in Margot’s life whom she’s been introduced to only in conversation. A novel begins to pour out of Sibyl as she borrows more and more from Margot’s story.
Were that the film’s entire premise, Sibyl could have been just as good as all its glossy cinematography makes it look. But the love affair at the film’s core, which grows in expected ways, spins from complicated into messy. And with the inclusion of sudden flashbacks that tell us Sibyl is a recovering alcoholic — whose previous relationship mirrored Margot’s current one in multiple ways — the film becomes mired in its desperate efforts at profundity.
It’s unfortunate, too. Sibyl was directed and co-written by Justine Triet, who last made In Bed With Victoria, a memorable little romance also starring Efira. In fact, it’s Efira and Exarchopoulos holding this movie up with their impassioned performances, like a bent and battered wire hanger struggling to support an oversized wool sweater. You know the one — it’s not going to make it!
Perhaps the intent is for the film to break down, just as its protagonist breaks down in her efforts to craft an engaging story while battling her real-life demons. If so, I’d rather it be even a smidge less scattered under its very pretty surface.
Viewers are warned at the very start of the film, when a verbose acquaintance attempts to mansplain the art of writing to Sibyl.
“Writers take readers hostage,” he says in an almost throwaway comment between mouthfuls of food and nonsense. While the film doesn’t manage to hold its viewers fully captive, Sibyl’s writing certainly seems to steal her own soul, as well as the souls of those around her. And that, I can say as a writer, is where Sibyl finds some of the truth and chills it’s after.
