Leonardo Van Dijl’s film is called Julie is silent. Everything happens in a training center for young sportsmen, in Belgium. He features a young tennis player, Julie (Tessa Van Den Broeck). Sufficiently gifted to ambition a professional career, Julie is Jeremy’s favorite student, her coach, with whom, we quickly understand, history is not clear. The disorder is clearer when the club management informs the students that Jeremy is suspended after another young player of the club, placed under his responsibility, both best friend and competing with Julie, committed suicide.
We do not know what is reproached for the coach, but we think of things. Without index, without history or testimony, we are delivered to the madness of the house, the imagination, that which produces, as we know, only common places. It must be the director’s intention, the subject of his film not being to tell us what happened between Julie and her coach, but perhaps to respect Julie’s silence, her obstinate refusal or His physical incapacity to tell what happened (if something happened) and his resistance in the face of the relentlessness of his entourage who wants to make her say what she does not want to say to say. The management of the center needs his word to expand the investigation of which the coach is the object, and to understand the possible errors which could have been made. But it is also a question of “liberating Julie” who, in fact, as we can see, does not seem to go well at all. “It’s okay, Julie? – Yes, it’s okay. – You know, if you want to talk, I’m here.” It’s nice but no, she doesn’t want to talk.
My best childhood friend was like that, taciturn. Violed by his stepfather, he did not drop the song until the day of his 50th anniversary. Did I have to wait until Julie was 50 years old?
The ICT of slowness
Fixed, aesthetic plans, long, contradictory lights, sought -after framing, the shock of tennis bullets, without the weight of Julie’s words that hits and retapes on the ball, always in the same way, without being able to detect in his way of hitting these bullets, nature or variations in its feelings. Between two series of volids, the actress having nothing to do other than be silent, she makes too much, her inexpressiveness turns to cabotinage.
Fortunately, the big scene of the film arrives: Julie and her coach sit at a coffee table, face-to-face. He too wants to make her speak. But she continues to be silent. Unable to support the discomfort, he launched himself: “She has not supported that you are better than she, that’s why she committed suicide.” Now it’s clear, the coach is a big pervert. After having made Julie responsible for what happened, he innocents himself: “When you talked about stopping, I stopped … huh, Julie! …. I stopped?” But what? I told you it was not the subject of the film!
Julie returns to training, balls, still bullets, bodybuilding. Her new coach, believing that he is doing well, asks him to make a “kick”, I did not understand what a kick was, even when she saw her making it a series. Neither does the filmmaker mean to tell us. Would he be won by the silence of his character? The new coach wants the whole class to watch Julie do a kick, to take example from her. Julie doesn’t like it, serving as an example. And she will tell the coach. Which will seem to understand. We learn that Julie will no longer be done now.
Julie is silent is Leonardo Van Dijl’s first feature film which made three front films, which I have not seen. But this feature film has the paradoxical defect, noticed in many short films: slowness. A ICT that often punctuates the heaviness of demonstrations. Demonstrate that we have talent, to demonstrate that love is stronger than anything. That war is bullshit. And here, that the rape of young tenniswomen by their coach is an abomination. In general.