Sibyl - Therapie Zwecklos

I can't recall seeing a film with so many good and great elements: cinematography, acting, a good deal of great dialogue, that was assembled into such a let down of total experience. It is like observing a kid who is smart, has everything, goes to he best schools -- yet goes nowhere in life.

I don't know where this project went wrong. Was it deep flaws from the beginning and they went ahead without resolving them, or was it some kind of creative fight in post production, perhaps about comedy vs drama as the goal in editing?

The trailer was classically misleading. I did not expect a pale remake of Providence (1977) directed by Alain Resnais.

In short: 1) Sibyl has a few undisclosed skeletons in the closet and manages them while drinking abusively. 2) Sibyl is a shrink and the border between her private life and her professional life does not exist. 3) Sibyl is a writer and she draws inspiration from her own surroundings. Thus, given these three points, fiction and reality are quickly confused, for Sibyl first and for the audience even more.

Although the actresses Sandra Hüller and Adèle Exarchopoulos are outstanding, this story of a lost woman suffering of emotional distress is globally boring.

This film kept me in its grip, and I enjoyed every twist and turn as the plotlines unfolded. The acting was superb and the main characters were complex, compelling and elusive.

I'm quite surprised to see such low ratings, but to each their own! To me, the film's seemingly disparate elements/themes (e.g. Trauma, depression, addiction, grief/loss, desire, deception, vanity, power, exploitation) came together to paint a beautifully absurd portrait of the human condition.

In particular, the film seems to emphasize the ways that we naively cling to earthly vices/pleasures and deceptive/delusional narratives in our fights against feelings of disillusionment, meaninglessness and hopelessness.

Sibyl wants to stop her psychiatry practice in order to write the next great French novel. But not before she agrees to treat a pregnant girl who is in love with a famous actor. Fast forward a few weeks, and Sybil is suddenly in the middle of a Love triangle (or is it trapezium?), that opens old wounds and make her question her perception of reality. Who needs therapy now?

Independent director Justine Triet has been praised by the critics for her previous works that underline social and political problems. Here we deal with a crisis of a domestic nature and one wonders if the film is based on the director's personal experience. SYBIL cannot be called feminist even though it features plenty of strong women making tough choices. The problem is that those female characters are all despicable and hardly inspire any sympathy from the viewer. The story is patchworky and, while intriguing, it takes a long time to get to the meat of things. Erotic scenes while well made seem irrelevant and the plot itself is hard to define - it's like it was re-written in the last minute. And we are left wondering what it was all about.

Filled with great performances from all Involved, and with its decent cinematography, the movie mostly suffers from the story's inconsistencies and a lack of focus. Overstuffed with ideas which are plenty but never quite make it whole the film struggles to find its identity and borderlines on any piece of entertainment's worst enemy - which is boredom!

This movie is much more confusing than it needed to be which makes the immersion in the story very challenging at the start without any big payoff for the effort. It's just a way to try and make the movie seem more interesting than in reality is. Well shot and acted.