Julie Keeps Quiet (Julie zwijgt, 2024), which deals with the refutation of the notion of idealism through the concept of silence, objectifies the events that exist outside the individual by a method of concealing them. Leonardo Van Dijl gives his first feature film an inevitable yet well-founded subjectivity. Julie Keeps Quiet, which we watched as part of the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), tries to introduce a character’s existence through direct or indirect experience with the character of Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck). The trap of meaning, which is never clarified throughout the film but develops only based on guesswork, gains more depth towards the later stages of the movie. In the film, choosing to remain silent is presented as an innocent choice, and the entire burden of the unknown reality is left on Julie‘s shoulders without revealing the truth. Leonardo Van Dijl‘s Julie Keeps Quiet presents a formal flow of thought while becoming a slave to the weight of the reality it holds in its hands. As the situation becomes more acute, the outlines of the main characters become more distinct, so we can observe that the characters are also divided into categories to a certain extent.
Intuition Is Not for Sale
Due to the composition of the narrative, on the one hand we observe Julie remaining like the lonely open door of an empty room, and on the other hand we witness the inner loneliness of the same character because no one enters the room. Julie, who has already absorbed the idea of being understood rather than being directly understood, draws her strength from the inexplicable without feeling any obligation towards the outside, because the unexplained had already spread itself outwards a long time ago. The film’s incorporation of an individual game, such as tennis, into this narrative is particularly noteworthy, because the power of the act of withholding information is entirely based on the individual. In this way, Julie‘s tennis character, which is kept secret, is further strengthened.
The Illusion of Shadow Names
Jeremy (Laurent Caron) continues to be a shadow figure from the beginning of the film and his dark effect on the main character resembles a moving object. Furthermore, Julliette (Julliette De Hous) and Backie (Pierre Gervais) turn into puppet-like objects of a transcendental object. The main characters of the film, which stands out with its secret story, are strongly reflected. Accordingly, the fact that the locations are mostly in the house and the well-known sports center-school indicates a pure use of space. In this way, the used space is always put in the background and the main characters are used as a base of these places. This kind of background of Tessa Van den Broeck, who plays Julie and is also very interested in sports in real life, is reflected in the film sharply and the film gains its strongest aspect through this character. This way, the events that occur are connected to a certain chain and constantly gathered around the same characters. Nowadays, movies are made about tennis with a certain aesthetic structure. Last year, Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers left its mark on contemporary cinema. Especially in the film, which has a certain visual aesthetic form, tennis was always used as a secondary tool. We can say that the same usage style is also in the Julie Keeps Quiet. Only this film has withdrawn from the visual aesthetic rhythm compared to Challengers and the tennis elements offer a more realistic flow.
What We Cannot Say Makes Us Strong
Choosing a completely individual narrator system from the use of the camera to the flow of the story, Leonardo Van Dijl can surpass a completely individual sport such as tennis in terms of individualism. In this way, he leans on the identity of a sport that is completely action-oriented, but never leaves the narrator, who is the owner of the mysterious story, alone. Naomi Osaka, one of the producers of the film, also draws attention in the best possible way (she’s ranked as the World number 1 in women’s singles in 2019). In such a dramatic narrative, encountering such a great name from tennis history makes the film even more meaningful. Julie Keeps Quiet, which does not completely take its melancholic dose from any frame, never gives an answer that will satisfy our curiosity, but teaches a lesson on how to increase the sense of curiosity in every frame. Definitely a must watch, especially for sports and/or tennis lovers.
