Julie Keeps Quiet movie storyline. A player in a prestigious sports club, Julie dedicates herself fully to tennis, her sport, her training, and her career. When her coach is suspended, rumors start spreading and voices, other than Julie’s, are heard. Focused on her sports goals, Julie chooses to keep quiet as Belgian director, Leonardo van Dijl, follows her each step of the way, one ball after the next, respecting her decision, always choosing the right angle, keeping the right distance, that is to say the most accurate and – most importantly – the fairest.
Julie Keeps Quiet (Dutch: Julie Zwijgt) is a 2024 drama film, directed by Leonardo Van Dijl (in his directorial debut) and written by Van Dijl and Ruth Becquart. It stars Tessa Van den Broeck, Ruth Becquart, Koen De Bouw, Claire Bodson, Laurent Caron, Sofie Decleir, Tijmen Govaerts, Julliette De Hous, Grace Biot, Alyssa Lorette, Pierre Gervais and Stefan Gota.
It had its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in the Critics’ Week section on 18 May 2024, where it won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution and SACD Award. The film was chosen as the Belgian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
Film Review for Julie Keeps Quiet
ilmgoers are currently gobbling up Luca Guadagnino’s tennis comedy Challengers with its hilariously imagined sexual dynamic between a female coach and male players. This debut feature from Belgian film-maker Leonardo Van Dijl is a reminder that in the real world, the gender relations of sex and power in tennis – or anywhere – are generally pretty different. Julie Keeps Quiet is a tense, absorbing movie of silences and absences, of difficult terrain skirted around, of subjects avoided. It’s a reminder that in key situations, to keep quiet is a stressful, strenuous and, crucially, public activity – and a survival instinct that many young people have to learn.
The scene is an exclusive Belgian youth tennis academy where Julie is the star player, played very convincingly by newcomer and talented teen tennis player Tessa Van den Broeck. Julie’s ferocious skills are clearly bringing her to the brink of professional stardom under the aegis of the Belgian Tennis Federation, and extended sequences in the film show her simply playing, hitting, training and working out, her anxieties sublimated into sport. Yet at the very beginning, Van Dijl shows us Julie weirdly playing “mime” tennis, running about the court, pretending to hit a non-existent ball.
Like everyone else in the academy, Julie is stunned by news that a young woman called Aline, the academy’s star pupil of a few years ago, has taken her own life, having abandoned tennis and suffered from depression; there are whispers that it had something to do with “lockdown”. But then head coach Jeremy is suspended while the academy launches an internal investigation, whose procedures are opaque. And now all eyes are on Julie who has taken over Aline’s status as the star pupil and has been in intimate, unsupervised contact with Jeremy every day, and continues to talk to him on the phone. Ever so delicately, the academy suggests via her teachers and school that Julie might like to tell them something – in fact, to testify in a way. But Julie keeps quiet.
Yet the point here is that everyone is keeping quiet. The weather of the film, its atmosphere of normality doggedly pursued, is governed by that quiet. Van Dijl shows us that the academy’s staff realise that the prime candidate for accuser-in-chief would of course be Julie herself. They know that this investigation of theirs might well be the prelude to police action and that the investigation will itself be looked at by the police.
They have to be seen to have examined rigorously the obvious possibility that abuse has gone further. But they are also performatively sensitive, not wanting to push Julie when there is, as yet, no explicit question of wrongdoing; this sensitivity dovetails conveniently with the fact that they perhaps have no great desire to uncover systemic abuse that would point to their own complicit negligence.
So the eerie quiet goes on. And Julie herself realises what it is she is being loyal to; she is smart enough to realise that to testify in any way would be to have her whole existence defined by this, and very possibly spoil her sporting future. Yet she also cringes and flinches from the way the replacement instructor gives Julie top-of-the-class status, making the rest of the class watch as she demonstrates a perfect second-serve technique and refusing to punish her when she is late for practice. Julie understands, as does the rest of the class and indeed the audience, that this is exactly the kind of favouritism Jeremy went in for, and it is being reinterpreted by everyone around her. This is a gripping study in dysfunction and repression.
Julie Zwijgt
Directed by: Leonardo Van Dijl
Starring: Tessa Van den Broeck, Ruth Becquart, Koen De Bouw, Claire Bodson, Laurent Caron, Sofie Decleir, Tijmen Govaerts, Julliette De Hous, Grace Biot, Alyssa Lorette, Pierre Gervais, Stefan Gota
Screenplay by: Ruth Becquart, Leonardo Van Dijl
Cinematography by: Nicolas Karakatsanis
Film Editing by: Bert Jacobs
Costume Design by: Ellen Blereau
Art Direction by: Julien Denis, Warzée Quentin
Music by: Caroline Shaw
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Jour2Fête (France)
Release Date: October 5, 2024 (United States)
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