In Promises, Promises, Adam Phillips writes, “When people need a new question to ask of themselves, then it may be worth their while to go and see a psychoanalyst. If they are more interested in answers than in the trouble with answers, their time and money will probably be better spent elsewhere.”¹ Justine Triet’s latest film, Sibyl (2019), asks refreshing questions about declining investments in psychoanalysis in a post-digital age, and chronicles how the mechanisms of late capitalism shield us from ethical complexity. It opens with an image which distills the illusional abundance of a ‘choice economy’: a conveyer belt in a Parisian sushi restaurant, where different combinations of raw fish and rice parade on an endless loop. The eponymous protagonist, played with radiant precision by Virginie Effira, is having lunch with her former literary editor. Having worked as a psychoanalyst since the publication of her first novel, she wants to take time out and write a second book, but is struggling for inspiration. More sushi arrives. The editor suggests a sensational, “Amanda Knox style” story, a foreshadowing on Triet’s part that is deliberately misleading. By the film’s close, Sibyl has done everything it can to frustrate the trope of two women locked in violent competition.
Sibyl, shifting away from Phillips’s original image of the frustrated patient, is interested in what happens when a psychoanalyst herself walks away from the vocation, and the questions – ethical, emotional, and interpersonal – that arise from this abandonment.. After making the decision to stop seeing patients and instead focus on her writing, Sibyl is in bed when a call comes through from a frantic and distraught actress, Margot (Adèle Exarchopolous) who is in the throes of turbulent personal conflict. She has become pregnant, on the set of a new film, after a secret affair with her co-star (Gaspard Ulliel) who is also the female director’s (Sandra Hüller, of Toni Erdmann fame) roving boyfriend.
At first resistant, Sibyl soon relents and begins treating Margot, who quickly demands something impossible from the analysis, wanting Sibyl to decide for her if she should abort or not. At the same time, Sibyl starts appropriating Margot’s irresistible narrative as material for her new book, transgressing all codes of confidentiality by secretly recording sessions and transcribing Margot’s confessions on her laptop at all hours of the day and the night. Consumed by the details of the story, Sibyl also can’t resist an eventual invitation, willed in part by the film’s masochistic director, to be flown out to the location of the set on the island of Stromboli in Italy to ‘fix’ the situation. Yet, making space for inconsistencies and the eternal snags of self-contradiction, Triet also shows Sibyl’s decision to be motivated by concern for Margot’s fraying mental state. Unable to entirely leave the ethics of the psychoanalyst behind, yet also following the more calculating methods of the novelist, Sibyl cares deeply for her patient while also ruthlessly exploiting her.
The trip forms the dramatic apex of the film. When tensions between the doomed erotic triangle of lead actress, actor and filmmaker reach breaking point, Sibyl is pushed into the unlikely corner of having to direct a few scenes herself, rapturously praised for her “spontaneous ability”. Yet the pressure of being recruited as the film set’s oracle and all-round guardian angel, despite her good intentions, soon becomes too much, and Sibyl relapses into prior difficulties with alcohol (earlier revealed to have been the cause of her mother’s untimely death) and sleeps with the actor who has been the source of such tormented fixation for Margot. After details of the sexual liaison become common knowledge, Sibyl is ejected from the set; the now twice-cheated-on director, though clearly devastated, declaring herself “too busy” for such dramas. In addition to the main narrative, a secondary thread in Sibyl excavates the passionate affair between Sibyl and a younger man, Gabriel (Nils Schneider) that ultimately led to the birth of her first child. Through flashback sequences, we witness both the emotional consequences of this relationship for Sibyl, but also its incendiary – and strikingly agential – erotic power. These intricate parallels between Margot’s and Sibyl’s stories further blur the line between psychoanalyst and patient. They suggest that despite consumerist society’s foregrounding of autonomous desire our choices are never totally volitional, but tangled up in other people, inflected by their contradictions and desires.
If the frequent movements between past and present occasionally makes Sibyl feel crowded, or breathlessly ambitious, to call the feature “muddled” and “silly”, as Peter Bradshaw recently did, rather ironically overlooks the film’s centring of imperfection and emotional lability, its lucid appraisal of a culture which tells women they can ‘have it all,’ as long as this ‘all’ is won by stringently individualist means. The film, in the broadest sense, is an appeal to empathy, even as the increasingly fragmented forms of labour that define our current moment put the time and space that empathy requires under mounting pressure; the psychoanalytic experience of sitting down and simply being present to another person’s consciousness becoming more and more of a steep demand. Sibyl’s conspicuous dismantling of psychoanalysis’s formal choreographies (Sibyl and Margot start by sitting properly across from one another in an office, yet soon their sessions splinter into Skype, phone calls, texts, digital ephemera) visibly enacts this point.
The challenges of empathy are rendered painfully explicit in a late scene in the film. Several months after Stromboli, her novel written and Margot’s film newly released, Sibyl shows up uninvited to its premiere so drunk she gives fresh nuance to the concept of ‘making a scene’. While the cast of male actors and technicians look on impassively, it is Margot who cleans Sibyl up, orders her a taxi, takes her home. “I read your novel,” she tells her, mid-drive, but refuses Sibyl’s slurred attempts at an apology, and even gives her a place to stay when Sibyl’s disgusted husband refuses to open their apartment door to her. This conclusion reflects Triet’s generosity towards her characters; the permission that she gives to them to be flawed, behave badly, and the forgiveness they receive all the same (Sibyl’s collapse at the premiere is followed by something like redemptive scenes of her celebrating a new lengthy period of sobriety, and having a honest conversation with her daughter about her complex genealogy). If the idea of the ‘difficult woman’ has become a little fatigued of late, then Triet does not venerate this difficulty in a show of fetishised complexity, but asks how the figure might be pushed towards more interesting ends. Her film refuses to endorse any binaries of feminine behaviour: any hard, glaring distinctions between Sibyl the ‘good’ psychoanalyst and Sibyl the ‘bad’ writer; between Sibyl ‘drunk’ and Sibyl ‘sober.’ Instead, it showcases the ‘troubling’ condition of not having a firm answer to the question of where to invest one’s energies, yet also locates vitality in that unresolved and fluctuating state.
The understanding of psychoanalysis as an “impossible profession” belongs to Janet Malcolm, who in her book of the same name, exposed the field as an austere, male world intent on reproducing Freud’s main theories.² But Sibyl shows that the more open-ended sphere of neoliberal, entrepreneurial exploitation (both of the self and others) is still more fraught. Though the central relationship between Margot and Sibyl is flawed, messy and perhaps creates more problems than it solves, it is better, Triet subtly conveys, than the atomised endeavour of infinite ‘self-actualisation’. Walking away, her film suggests, is easy. Staying in relation to another person is the harder, less immediately gratifying task.
1 Adam Phillips, ‘The Trouble with Answers,’ in Promises, Promises (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), p.178. 2 Janet Malcolm, The Impossible Profession (New York: Vintage, 1991)
Alice Blackhurst is a writer and junior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.
