Cinema of the World

IMDB

Plot
Tilda Swinton stars in director Erick Zonca's drama about a forty year old alcoholic who, in a rare moment of sobriety, sees where her life is headed and makes one last ditch attempt to steer herself away from the disastrous path that she has been locked on for as far back as she can remember. Julia may be manipulative, notoriously untrustworthy, and completely incapable of uttering any word that isn't an outright lie, but somehow - perhaps due to sheer charisma - this statuesque deceiver has always managed to get by. But Julia has been hardened by too many vodkas and too many one-night stands, and lately the lonely life of drifting from job to job in her 1979 Chrysler New Yorker has left her wanting something more. While her old boyfriend Mitch occasionally tries to break through Julia's haze, lately she has surrendered herself to the fact that she is simply one of life's losers. As her finances begin to run short and panic begins to set in, a desperate Julia turns to crime but is forced to go on the run with a young boy named Tom after her plan falls hopelessly apart. Allmovie.com

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Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian on November 28, 2008 Julia is a bizarre film project that might well make conventional producers queasy. It is an existential kidnap caper movie set in LA, New Mexico and Tijuana, and stars an arty British thesp playing what one critic called "a swaggering floozy with a monumental drink problem". It was made with an alienated American crew ("They really were a pain in the ass," says Zonca. "They had no idea what they were filming") and a director rewriting the script with his co-scenarist on set. Zonca couldn't raise American money for the project, which was ultimately bankrolled by France's Studio Canal. But Studio Canal cut the budget by a third one month before the shoot. According to Swinton, she lost weight owing to the pressures of filming in straitened circumstances. Some critics have compared the resulting film to John Cassavetes' Gloria, seeing Swinton as a latter-day Gena Rowlands. "I'm very happy with the Cassavetes comparison," Zomca says. "I was watching Opening Night and Killing of a Chinese Bookie while I was working on the film. Not because I wanted to copy them, but because the way he shoots things without close ups and in long takes is something I aspire to do." Others, however, were less kind. The trade-magazine critics trashed the picture when it was shown at the Berlin film festival, saying there is no place in the world - at least not in American cinemas - for a 144-minute picture edited down from its original four-hour running time with such a thoroughly unlikable central character. Variety's critic suggested Julia was a "startling misfire" that "uncomfortably welds arthouse sensibilities with genre tropes". Stateside chances are negligible for this English-language flick, he predicted. […] Zonca's film, however, slips into many other things: arthouse longueurs, calculated overacting and borderline hysteria, not to mention some scenes that will have purer souls than mine rolling their eyes in moral outrage. For example, there's a scene in which Julia wakes up in a motel cuddling the boy she has kidnapped. It would be a tricky enough scene for any director to tackle and for any actor to perform, but as Zonca shot the scene, he realised that the boy had woken up and was staring at Swinton's breast, which had somehow become exposed. "I was like this," says Zonca, framing his face with two hands to suggest he's behind a camera, behind which are a pair of goggle eyes. "I didn't know whether this was fortuitous or terrible that her breast popped. But Tilda thought it was great. So we went with it." "And, don't forget," says Py, "the boy's mother, who was on the set at the time - she was OK with it."

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Word on the street after the Berlinale was that French director Erick Zonca's English language debut, Julia, was either an homage to the films of John Cassavetes (to those who liked it) or a pitiful tinkering with Cassavetes's style (to those who hated it, and sometimes quite viscerally). Maybe it's just because I was looking for it too hard, but I frankly didn't see it, unless having a female protagonist is all it takes to compare a film to Cassavetes, in which case we're in worse shape than I thought. So, leaving out the Cassavetes connection, here's how I found Julia: a film with a magnificent opening 45 minutes or so, that turns into an agreeable but derivative botched-kidnapping for another 45 minutes, before finally turning into a sloggy trip to Mexico that serves very little obvious purpose other than spackling some extra running time onto a film that ends up feeling overlong at some two and a quarter hours. At all points, the plot is significantly less interesting than Julia Harris, the woman at its center, and this is primarily because of Tilda Swinton, one of the best actresses currently working in the cinema. Even the briefest scan of Swinton's two-decade career makes it quite obvious that she's not the kind of performer who has a "type", but even given that observation, Julia doesn't feel like a Swinton character. Loud-mouthed, alcoholic, a trashy dresser, given to waking up in men's beds with no particular recollection of how she got there, Julia could easily have turned into an ugly caricature, and Swinton doesn't always avoid that trap, particularly in the earliest scenes showcasing Julia's booziest excesses. But even though she is playing a woman who basically lacks dignity, the actress never seems to betray knowledge of that fact. Julia herself doesn't realise that she lacks dignity, and Swinton does a more than credible job fleshing out the character's ill-placed self-assurance without asking for laughs or pity. It's just who Julia is, and it's commendable that Swinton is comfortable letting that be the end of it. It's also worth at least mentioning that the actress is willing to let herself be so deglamorized as she is in this role, full of sweat and dirt and flab and awful makeup, but Swinton hasn't ever been an actress to shy away from physically ugly roles, so it feels more like business as usual than bravery. Take out that wonderful central performance and what's left is a film of little distinction. The plot is unabashed color-by-numbers: Julia, faced with a life crumbling down around her, has the misfortune to believe her fellow AA member, Elena (Kate del Castillo), an obviously unstable woman who gets very excited when talking about her impending plot to kidnap her son, adopted by his wealthy paternal grandfather and kept from his mother, and now Elena wants Julia to help her with this scheme (the manner in which Elena is unambiguously presented as crazy is so over the top that I genuinely believed that she was making up the entire relationship, based on some newspaper clippings, and the only moment in the film that really surprised me is when it turns out that she is, indeed, the birth mother). At first seduced by Elena's promise of$20,000, Julia comes up with a better idea - why not kidnap Tom (Aidan Gould) herself, and hold him for ransom? Of course, movie kidnappings aren't ever that simple, for else they would not provide movie plots, and Julia's terrible mishandling of everything from the phone calls to the grandfather to the easily-penetrated safehouse eventually sends her scurrying to Mexico with the boy. So far, so good, if hardly exceptional; but in the film's last third in Mexico, things go entirely off the rails. Julia's continued idiocy ends with Tom getting kidnapped again, and the kidnappers, assuming that she's the boy's mother, present her with a ransom of their own. Thus begins some 20 minutes of Julia's attempts to choreograph her own receipt of the $2 million she asked for with providing the kidnappers with their $1 million (up from $100,000 after Julia failed to keep her mouth shut), all while keeping everybody in the dark about what's happening. Things end surprisingly cleanly, but for a while there the film is positively unbearable - this might have possibly worked as farce, but it's presented completely straight, and it makes a long film significantly longer. The good news it that Zonca (whose work I've not previously seen) elects to use a simple, almost Spartan visual style for Julia, which is mostly comprised of wide establishing shots or close-ups, particulaly close-ups of Tilda Swinton, and those are always good things. Which is to say, he avoids the gonzo post-Tarantino stylegasms that would probably have infected every frame of the film if it were an American production. He even keeps the film's few patches of violence tastefully offscreen. Of course, this is all because the kidnapping isn't the point of the film: it's not a crime thriller but a character study, of what happens to Julia as a result of her actions. It could have come a lot closer to working on that level if it weren't so contemptibly long, but Swinton has a good face for the "bug in a jar" school of filmmaking that Zonca seems to favor, and it's largely her presence that saves Julia from itself. from “Antagony & Ecstasy” Blog

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