She plays a math prodigy who falls into an affair with her dream-preppie TA. An unwise idea, but the movie plays it out with startling conviction. 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. It’s a true 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. 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 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.
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