After the tail degree from an elite Belgian tennis The academy commits suicide, her shocking death triggers an investigation into the late teenager’s relationship with the (now suspended) older male coach who had been so instrumental for her success. That survey will gradually but inevitably focus on the coach’s latest protégé, which has spent in recent years under his wing, and is about to qualify for Belgian Tennis Federation. People can’t help but suspect that she knows a thing or two about how coach Jeremy (Laurent Caron) treats her students when no one else is there to see. Her friends, her parents, the administrators at her school … Everyone is eager to fill in empty subjects, but Julie keeps quiet.
Of course, Leonardo van Dijl’s “Julie Keeps silent” does not consider so much of a spoiler. This impressive debut function – cold as a crypt and yet extremely sensitive at once – is never framed as a mystery, or at least not as the mystery that you can expect from its condition.
Like the title on film Clarify from the beginning, the question in the heart of this story is not whether Julie (the first time actress and veteran tennis player Tessa van Den Broeck) will speak up, or even what she can reveal if she did. The question in the heart of this film – which is executive produced by Naomi Osaka And co-produced by the Dardenne brothers-is why Julie chooses to be silenced, and the overlapping range of possible answers provided by Van Dijl and Ruth Becquart’s script allows this sobering age to mature into an absorbent implosive portrait of a girl who learns to listen to herself.
Or at least to listen to oneself clearlySince it is not as if a number of external voices have found their way into Julie’s head – just one, coach Jeremy’s, whose thoughts have been affected by her own. Kinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis shoots the girl as if she were a perfect echo chamber, his 35 mm frames suffocating Julie with a soft focus that makes her feel that she is worlds away from her friends on the next court over.
This is perhaps why the opening scene finds Julie practicing her blows herself when she chases an invisible ball over the baseline in minutes at the end, the tennis equivalent with shadow boxing. This will hardly be the last time that Van Dijl drills his attention in Julie’s monastic training routine, as if the Star -athletter tried to sublimate himself in the sport that has come to define her, or as if she had never learned any other way to express herself (at one point we see her that we should turn through an old photo album that seems to be in the last decade in the last decade
Julie is a warrior, but that endurance believes in the vulnerabilities in her game. In the chips and smiling interview movies that she looks at her dead predecessor, Aline, the older girl rays that coach Jeremy taught her to have control over her feelings (the crushing dark irony in that claim is the closest that this movie comes to a sense of humor), and we realize that Julie has been encouraged to play through some kind of pain. Speaking out would fly before her training.
A more prescription film can build a scene where she breaks down and tells her parents everything Jeremy did to her, but “Julie keeps quiet” -igen, according to her title-omit all traces of melodrama in favor of highlighting sublimin elements of self-discovery. Once proud to be the brightest perspective of the academy, Julie blanches stop when her friendly new coach Backie (Pierre Gervais) practices so that the rest of the students can admire her footwork. The investigation has obviously made her careful with the limelight, but every scene in this movie examines a little deeper than that; In this case, it made me wonder if Julie might have felt in Aline’s footsteps, and if it had recently made her unwilling to serve as a model for the other girls.
We are with the character for every millisecond of this movie, and yet van Den Broeck’s performance – Steely but seeks – never betrayed any of Julie’s secrets. The actress implicitly realizes that Julie’s silence is her greatest strength. Some of the people in her life, and some of the people in Van Dijl’s audience, may claim that she lacks the courage to speak her truth, but “Julie keeps silent” is so honest and humane just because Julie has the courage to make that truth for herself before she feels to share it with the world (it is the biogematic equivalent to watching Novak Djokov Djokv
With Jeremy on the page from taking on new students, Julie’s silence creates her own type of security, especially when it forces the people around her to show her cards. It is through her silence that Julie can appreciate Backie’s sincerity and how the school administrator’s concern about Julie’s well -being hide her even greater concern about a scandal.
The longer the film continues, the more it seems that Julie’s silence is shipping with valuable information, and the sterility of van Dijl’s approach – his aesthetics as a redoing of Michael Haneke in his removal as it is by Dardenne brothers in its focus – will soon adopt their own intensity. We can get some important details from the only scene where Julie meets with coach Jeremy personally (his profile always seized in shadow, his compliments all dangerously backhanded), but we can analyze so much more from the wordless revelation that Julie secretly recorded her conversation.
Van Dijl never reaches from that way for pressurized introspection, and “Julie Keeps silent” can sometimes feel a bit anemic and repetitive as a result of the tight -raised discipline. The movie breathes a bit when Julie starts out of her shell and find out how Jeremy may have isolated her from the rest of the world (there are a number of dangerously drawn scenes where she begins to reconnect with her friends), but it is not as if she ever finds the words to formulate the details of her experience, or to indicate the severity of what was left.
And yet, “Julie keeps quiet” so just affects just because it refuses to become a movie about what its name has to say. On the contrary, this is a movie about what she can find in a silence she never recognized as such until everyone asked her to speak, and it is because of the silence that Julie can eventually discover the power in her own voice.
Rating: B.
Metrograph Pictures will release “Julie Keeps silent” on Metrograph for a one week’s run starting on Friday March 28.
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