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”).
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 this loser? 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 has 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.
