On the Adamant tells the story of a floating sanctuary for people with mental illness
ON THE ADAMANT (Nicolas Philibert, 2023)
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“Mentally sick people have no family,” François Gozlan says in Nicolas Philibert’s charming and heartwarming On the Adamant. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2023 Berlinale, the documentary is set on board the Adamant, a beautiful floating sanctuary docked at the Quai de la Rapée on the Seine, where a community of men and women with mental illness voluntarily gather for meetings, workshops, and general camaraderie, forming their own kind of chosen family. Started in July 2010 by the Paris Central Psychiatric Group and affiliated with the Saint-Maurice hospital complex, the Adamant offers compassionate care while encouraging the patients to explore their social and artistic sides.
Over the course of seven months in 2021 during the Covid crisis, Philibert compiled one hundred hours of footage, filming the group going over their budget, welcoming new people, playing music, cooking, painting, and working behind a coffee counter. While there are various nurses, a psychiatrist or psychologist, occupational therapists, and hospital service agents present, they are not easy to identify; no one is wearing white lab coats or name cards, so it’s not always immediately clear who is the patient and who is the caregiver.
Director, cinematographer, and editor Philibert, with a crew of no more than four, alternates between being a fly on the wall at meetings and workshops and speaking with several of the patients, who are aware, for the most part, of their medical situations and share poignant details of their personal lives. One woman discusses how she misses her teenage son, who went into foster care when he was five because, as she explains, “My mind was a mess.” A man plays a lovely tune on the piano and sings, “Nobody’s perfect.” Another man who plays the electric guitar says, “Everyone has thought of a magic wand. ‘No more this, no more that, I’ll be different.’” The dapper Frédéric Prieur, who is obsessed with the tragic deaths of Jim Morrison, James Dean, and Gérard Philipe, points out that he writes stories and songs because “I want to understand at all costs why such things happened to us.”
One man talks about his violent tendencies and ravings, admitting that without his pills he has “acute fits and hallucinations”; when he says, “Lucky I’m not armed,” it’s hard not to be reminded of the controversy in the United States about gun control. Another declares, “The people here aren’t terrorists. . . . They’re very fragile people. I’m very fragile myself. People have image problems here. That’s because others can look at us . . . In the Metro, we have slightly broken faces, maybe. I don’t know. People always give us curious looks.” But there’s nothing political in Philibert’s film other than showing that there are benevolent, humane options for treating the mentally ill, which he lets us see for ourselves; he doesn’t have any experts lecturing about what is happening on board and outside the Adamant.
Meanwhile, others share their hopes and dreams, which are not always feasible, lost in fantasies that are disconnected to reality — and perhaps more relevant to each of us than we might be willing to admit.
“You have some real stars here. Better than movie actors,” one man proudly boasts, and he’s right. As On the Adamant continues, the patients develop as unique characters in their own way, not stereotypes or caricatures put on display.
The Adamant is a refuge for people with mental illness to explore their creative sides
The film opens with Gozlan performing a screeching version of Téléphone’s “Human Bomb,” shouting out with defiance, “I want to talk to you about me, about you / Inside I see images, colors / that aren’t mine / that sometimes scare me, / sensations that can drive us mad / Our senses are the strings of pathetic marionettes / Our senses are the path to our mind / The human bomb, you have it in your hand / The detonator’s there just next to your heart / The human bomb is you, it belongs to you / If you let anyone take over your destiny / it’s the end.”
The Adamant offers the patients on board the chance to control at least part of their destiny. But the film, the first of a trilogy Philibert is making in conjunction with the Paris Central Psychiatric Group, closes with the Adamant enveloped in fog, as the future of people with mental illness is far from clear.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]