There was real justice in Kristen Stewart’s Berlin jury awarding their top prize, the Golden Bear, to this excellent movie from the 72-year-old French director and lion of documentary film-making, Nicolas Philibert. His film is compassionate, intelligent and shrewdly observed; it is about a Paris landmark which has only been in existence for 13 years but which tourists and anyone with an interest in mental health should really come and marvel at. The Adamant is a floating day-care centre for people with mental disorders, permanently moored on the Seine just by the Charles de Gaulle bridge. The design is half Mississippi gamblers’ riverboat, half art studio, with an elegant system of automatically opening louvred windows which make the most of daylight. The staff offer counselling and art therapy through music, painting, craft, literature and cinema. The Adamant hosts its own annual film festival for which the patients choose the films. There is also a cafe and bar.
The vessel’s name, the Adamant, is interestingly old-fashioned, like calling it the Fighting Temeraire. But it’s appropriate. Everyone involved is determined that the French state should protect this kind of respectful, collegiate approach which treats patients as human beings.
The movie begins with a fascinating, even sensational setpiece: a patient, François, sings the 1979 pop song La Bombe Humaine by the French band Téléphone. His face is strained and flinching but his delivery is passionate and brilliant – it’s an example of “outsider art”, a blazingly real outpouring of emotion and talent which is partly occluded by his problems but also in some sense deepened and given meaning by them. Later this man will tell Philibert that he is grateful for the art-based therapies – but even more for his meds, without which he would be raving that he was Jesus and throwing himself in the Seine.
Other patients are given comparable therapies through drawing, painting and photography. One former patient even offers to host movement-based classes for the patients herself, although Philibert shows us that the staff, however forward-thinking, clearly feel a little cautious about this development. Another patient, a cinephile, talks eloquently about Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura and says of his fellow patients: “You have actors in here who don’t know they’re actors. It’s not medical. They’re actors without realising.”
Philibert is a director who has shown an interest in the philosopher Michel Foucault. Watching this documentary, I couldn’t help thinking that he must have had, somewhere at the back of his mind, the image of the “ship of fools” from Foucault’s History of Madness, as well as his work on the 15th-century poem of that name by Sebastian Brant, a Platonic satire which Foucault influentially reinterpreted as the key image of pre-enlightenment madness, of mad people allowed to wander or float where they would, before the rational age of punitive surveillance decreed they should be confined and studied.
The Adamant is very different: a non-ship of non-fools. The fact that it’s floating (though moored) signals that it is some way outside the traditional buildings and institutions of psychiatry. Its patient-clientele are day visitors; at the end of the sessions, they return to their residencies and hostels. They are treated like students although, as François says, it is the off-camera world of meds that makes this possible. Yet there is a gentle and very happy sense of freedom and possibility aboard the Adamant, and there is enormous warmth, sympathy and human curiosity in this film.
• On the Adamant screened at the Berlin film festival.
