Thirty years ago John Cassavetes cast Gena Rowlands as a volatile gun moll who goes on the run with a kid in Gloria. Unsentimental, austere and claustrophobic the movie trapped us in an un-Holy and un-ruly relationship. Last year French filmmaker Erick Zonca, best known for The Dreamlife of Angels made ten years earlier, cast Tilda Swinton as a cranky, lying alcoholic in Julia.
It’s about a middle aged woman caught up in a ridiculous kidnapping scheme and ends up hitting the road, kidnapped kid in tow. When she’s not trying to bounce him off the walls, she’s looking for hugs.
Not to put too a fine a point on it, but Julia seems to be made under the sign of Cassavetes. It’s got the same sense of actuality like that great filmmaker’s best work. Which is to say it’s as busy as hell, still it seems to take a long time to get started. That’s probably because straight forward seeming scenes get stretched out under the influence of volatile performances.
Early on, Saul Rubinek has a doozy of a meltdown, playing one of Julia’s surviving friends from AA, as he gives her an emotional walloping. It doesn’t do her any good. Julia, looking for some sense of self (or is it greed or sensation?) is led into a plot by another AA cohort, Elena (Kate del Castillo) where she is to steal her son from her millionaire grandfather. It all goes bad. Suffice to say Julia is a lousy kidnapper.
Zonca told the media that the film emerges from his own long bout with drink and he wanted to make a movie on the subject that was an antidote to the suffocating sadness of something like Leaving Las Vegas. He has; Julia burns up with an energy bled from the thriller genre. There’s guns, blood, and stand-offs like a conventional caper film. But none of it seems calculated as a turn on.
It's shot in that 'you are there' style - shaky-cam, natural light, much favoured by Indies everywhere these days, and the verisimilitude only adds to the stakes. We don’t want to see anyone get hurt. But they do and most of the time its Julia’s fault. And she keeps going. Swinton is fine, but it’s a performance of maddening proportions. She’s impossible and I guess that’s the point.
