Julia and Julia (1988) Review

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(More customer reviews)If you're prepared to put logic aside, you can have a lot of fun with this film shot on high definition videotape for Italian TV and released theatrically. The title is misleading since Kathleen Turner as Julia only has one personality. It's her sense of reality that is multiplied. Grieving after the loss of her husband, she drives through a white cloud of smoke 6 years later, to enter the world where he had not died. Kathleen scores laughs as she tries to adapt to the expectations of those in her new (to her) world. It's similar to her later role in Peggy Sue Got Married, and there is the suggestion that the Julia that she has become has done things that Kathleen's Julia is unaware of since her husband, Gabriel Byrne, is projecting subtext. However Kathleen's bliss is short-lived when she is returned to the first reality where she starts a portentious affair with Sting. (We know from Brimstone & Treacle, and Plenty that anyone who dallies with him is in for trouble). Kathleen Turner is one of those actresses like Ingrid Bergman who can make the silliest predicament watcheable by their intense over-acting, even in spite of director Peter Del Monte being somewhat less than gallant in her sex scenes. He gives us a Hitchcock-ian set piece where Kathleen is being pursued and is rescued from the exiting crowd of a theatre, which is one of only two scenes where extras are used. The other is where she is being harassed by Sting in a piazza and the extras look non-plussed. Otherwise Julia's worlds are unusually underpopulated. Whether finally either reality is real or imaginary becomes unimportant since Del Monte is more interested in being metaphysically stylish. He cuts into Turner's sobbing in the car just before the cloud appears, as if he wasn't happy with any of her takes and had to splice them together, but also provides the film with a lovely Maurice Jarre score.

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