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There are two major pieces of news to come out of “The Julia Set,” the nothing-short-of-terrific new movie that premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s the first movie to feature Chase Infiniti since her breakout role as the Leonardo DiCaprio character’s daughter in “One Battle After Another,” and the first piece of news is that it confirms her movie-star mettle and astonishing quality of lyrical wised-up innocence as an actor.
She plays Julia Fischer, a math prodigy who’s a freshman in college, and who makes the mistake — though she chooses it with big dark wide open eyes — of falling into a romantic relationship with her ridiculously good-looking dream-preppie teaching assistant, played by Christopher Briney (from “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and the musical version of “Mean Girls”).
In “The Julia Set,” Infiniti portrays a numbers genius in the most convincing way possible — by wearing her virtuosity lightly and casually, as if it were second nature (which, for someone like Julia, it is). But she also makes Julia a disciplined and mature young woman who is still, by virtue of age and inexperience, just naïve enough to be poised between asserting herself and following the lead of a dude she should have steered clear of. “The Julia Set” isn’t some moralistic cautionary melodrama. It’s a drama about how Julia, like all of us at some point, falls into a thorny experience she’s not ready for, and how it shapes her.
The other piece of news, though, is that Niki Byrne, who wrote and directed the movie (it’s her second dramatic feature), is a star in her own right — a born filmmaker who knows how to lure the audience in ways both heightened and supple. She’s every bit as sharp a dialogue writer as she is a director. “The Julia Set” could be called a coming-of-age movie, and it certainly has a lot to say about the insidious qualities of a bad romance, but part of its excitement is that it’s not every day that we get to see the convincing tale of a math genius. Julia’s off-the-charts intelligence, which Infiniti embodies with exquisite conviction, changes the stakes of the movie; we’re rooting for her emotional salvation, but we’re also rooting for her to dazzle the universe with her talent. The film could have been called “Good Willa Hunting.”
Infiniti makes Julia a brilliant but grounded person who has very little ego invested in her talent. When her freshman TA, Pascal, takes a special interest in her, and starts to flirt with her, we feel the tension even more than we would have 10 years ago, because the very notion that a TA would try to date one of his students is more of an official no-no than it used to be. Yet Julia is aware of all that. And even as the film is too, it shows us we why she and Pascal are drawn to each other. They’re both beautiful, and they’re both beautiful math geeks, which means that they’re actually the rare people who can understand each other. Niki Byrne stages their heady shop-talk exchanges with a flippant density that keeps us hanging on every word.
It doesn’t take us long to pick up on the dynamic that’s going to toxify this relationship. Pascal is turned on by Julia’s intelligence. But he’s also subtly, insanely competitive. He invites her to join his advanced study group, presided over by the demanding Dr. Zatlan, played by the German actress Nina Hoss with a stern hauteur as mesmerizing as it is misanthropic. She’s training the members of the study group to enter the Putnam Competition, a fabled math test, consisting of just 12 questions (it’s been around for 100 years), that is widely considered to be the most difficult math test ever devised. The school is competing in it as a team, but so is each individual. For Julia, it could mean a ticket to MIT, a school she actually got into (along with Harvard and the University of Chicago and several others), but here she is attending her modest local college instead, because it’s the place that offered her the best scholarship, and she wanted to stay near her family: her loving mother (Carmen Ejoho) and beloved older brother, Evan (Alex Dillard), who has Down syndrome.
The first sign that something is up with Pascal — apart from the fact that no movie character since the age of John Hughes can look like this without being serious trouble — is when he performs disappointingly on a sample test, only to stalk out of the class, slap himself in the face, punch the bulletin board, and yell “Fuck!” It only gets worse from there. Some viewers, schooled in the new absolutist morality, may say: With red flags being waved in her face, why doesn’t Julia just ditch him? But what the movie is saying is: It doesn’t always work that way. Byrne stages a superb sequence in which Pascal takes Julia to meets his parents. His father is a legendary mathematician, Andrew Mandelbort, played by Jason Isaac in the most sly performance he’s ever given. We can see that Andrew is a narcissist who gets off on competing with his son, but what a magnetic dick! The scene in which he plays chess with Pascal is brilliantly done — we see their whole life story in that game. And Pascal’s mother, played with mournful spirit by Gillian Anderson, humanizes the whole situation.
Chase Infiniti leads us through “The Julia Project” by making her performance a true character study. Her Julia is cool and cunning and together; she’s also in over her smarter-than-everyone-else’s head. She wants to be a prodigy, and a worldly success, and a devoted daughter, and to be in love — all good things. But in this movie, they’re often in extreme conflict. And Infiniti makes Julia radiant in that very confusion. There is, of course, a climactic math competition. There is Adderall abuse and a car accident, and there is some next-level gaslighting. There are reckonings. Yet it all flows, because Niki Byrne unfurls this story with such panache and precision yet such effortless conviction. It’s clear that she, along with Chase Infiniti, is going to be a major player. Just watch the movie and do the math.
English (US) ·