On the Adamant Review: A Tender, If Half-Sketched, Survey of a Mental Health Haven

A mental health barge anchored on the Seine in downtown Paris, the Centre de jour l’Adamant is one of the city’s more unique psychiatric facilities. In addition to its unconventional location and distinctive boat-like architectural structure, it also provides a relatively experimental form of care, focusing primarily on creative workshops and offering patients a noticeable amount of freedom. Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant follows the daily routines of the small group of people who undergo treatment at the facility, as well as the various nurses and therapists helping them with their rehabilitation.

Philibert is perhaps best known for his documentary To Be and to Have, whose touching depiction of a dedicated primary school teacher and his pupils led to a major commercial breakthrough for the French filmmaker, though this surprise exposure also led to him being accused of exploitation by some of his subjects. The task of representing mental illness and those afflicted by it can be an even more precarious tightrope walk for a documentarian, and it’s to his credit that he mostly avoids tumbling into sensationalism or mawkish sentimentality.

Philibert spent months aboard the Centre de jour l’Adamant, and his attentive camera and non-intrusive approach afford his subjects space to express themselves on their own terms, with a similar level of care and empathy to that which the facility itself is set up to provide. The presentation creates a natural intimacy with the community, which brings out the patients’ humanity and provides a matter-of-fact rawness to their perspectives and reflections, from one young patient’s explanation of his extreme, quasi-synaesthetic association of words and images, to a mother’s heart-wrenching account of severe post-partum psychosis.

The interplay between creativity, communication, and control is a key theme here, and On the Adamant is bookended by performative outpourings of emotion. The film opens on middle-aged Francois’s impassioned rendition of French rock band Téléphone’s “La Bombe Humaine,” as the man evidently finds some relevance and cathartic release in its apocalyptic lyrics, and ends with a female patient’s alternately eloquent and desperate plea to take charge of a weekly dance class.

Though mental struggles and traumatic histories never fully disappear from view, the film takes pains to show its subjects channeling their more troubling impulses into artistic pursuits and finding new ways to make sense of their experiences, while foregrounding their idiosyncratic outlooks on life. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Frederic, a laidback, stylish bohemian whose psychological difficulties aren’t immediately obvious. When later scenes show him elaborating on the “negative karma” that’s plagued his life and beliefs that he was the inspiration for a number of Wim Wenders films and that he’s the reincarnation of Vincent van Gogh, this reveal seems entirely of a piece with On the Adamant’s earnestness and gently poetic tone.

As a sensitive portrayal of people whose conditions mostly prevent them from fitting into mainstream society, the film is a ringing success, but it’s hard not to feel like Philibert could have capitalized more on the access that he was granted to such fascinating individuals. Unwilling to risk subjectivity or authorial input, and also lacking in the forensic detail that might have provided a more in-depth analysis of the Centre de jour l’Adamant and its functioning, On the Adamant ultimately feels half-formed. It might have better served its subjects by participating in the imaginative playfulness that seems to be helping them at the facility, or by hinting at how their crises might be connected to broader sociological matters.