When her coach is suspended following a pupil's suicide, a tennis academy
pupil is pressured to discuss her relationship with him.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Leonardo van Dijl
Starring: Tessa Van den Broeck, Ruth Becquart, Ken De Bouw, Claire Bodson, Laurent Caron
The MeToo movement has seen women around the world, from many different
backgrounds and fields, break their silence regarding the sexual abuse
they've suffered, mostly from men occupying positions of power over them.
The best film to come out of the movement thus far, Kitty Green's The Assistant, focussed on the silence rather than the breaking thereof. For his
directorial debut, Belgian filmmaker Leonardo Van Dijl (co-writing with Ruth Becquart), follows Green's
lead. As its title implies, Julie Keeps Quiet is about a victim of abuse maintaining her silence, and while it
puts us in the position of wishing for its protagonist to speak up, it
makes us fully conscious of why so many refuse to do so.
Teenager Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck) is the star at her tennis
academy, idolised by her fellow students and seen by the adults in her
life as a golden child that might someday bring them fame and fortune. The
last pupil at the academy to possess such talent was Aline, who quit in
mysterious circumstances a few years ago. When news emerges of Aline's
suicide, her instructor Jeremy (Laurent Caron) is suspended under a
scandalous cloud of unsubstantiated gossip. The academy brings in an
outside intermediary to interview Jeremy's current students and find out
if they had any troubling experiences with the coach. The teens leap to
Jeremy's defence, but Julie refuses to be interviewed.
Van Dijl's film is commendably lacking exposition, with none of the
preachy speechifying that has dogged so many of the lesser movies to
emerge from the MeToo movement. Like the people around her, Julie's
silence forces us to study her face for clues regarding her refusal to
speak. Is she protecting Jeremy because she believes him innocent of any
wrongdoing or because she believes herself complicit in any abuse she
might have suffered at his hands? It's made clear early on in a quietly
fraught confrontation between Julie and Jeremy that something untoward did
indeed occur, but the exact details are concealed. There are no flashbacks
to Jeremy's grooming of Julie; instead we see how easily he might have
manipulated his power through scenes of Julie's relationship with Jeremy's
replacement, Backie (Pierre Gervais), whose singling out of Julie
makes her deeply uncomfortable. There's no suggestion that Backie is up to
no good, but his special treatment of Julie clearly brings back unwanted
memories for her. Julie no longer wants to feel special, but would rather
disappear into the background.
Films that deal with this unsettling subject matter tend to focus on the
question of whether justice will be served, but Julie Keeps Quiet is grounded in the troubling reality that "justice" is often
irrelevant for the victims in such cases. We sympathise with Julie for
playing dumb, as we understand that speaking out will force her to relive
an experience she would like to forget and would see her branded for life
with an asterisk throughout any potential career she might forge in
tennis. It's only when Julie learns that Jeremy has been quietly
transferred to another academy that she realises that while her silence
might protect herself, it could expose others like her to harm.
Julie Keeps Quiet never explicitly points the finger at anyone, but it implies that
the adults in Julie's life are complicit with Jeremy by preferring to
sweep things under the carpet so as to maintain their reputations. The
calm reaction of Julie's parents to the suggestion that their daughter may
have been abused speaks volumes about how they value Julie's potential
career above her well-being. Similarly, the authorities at the academy
seem quite relieved by Julie's silence, desperate not to have their
institution's name associated with such a scandal.
As you might expect for a piece of Belgian social realism, the Dardenne
Brothers act as executive producers here, and Van Dijl takes his cues from their early films, which were usually
focussed on a female protagonist becoming increasingly isolated by their
stance on a matter. Refusing to provide any easy answers, Julie Keeps Quiet has the honest messiness of those early Dardennes dramas. And
like the films that brought the Dardennes international
attention, Julie Keeps Quiet introduces us to a striking new acting talent in Van den Broeck. The young actress is given the difficult task of not
only having to convey her characters' fears and feelings without
dialogue, but she's also often required to do so while playing tennis to
a convincing standard. I'm no expert on the sport, but she certainly had
me convinced of Julie's talents and why so many might view her as an
investment to be treated delicately. Julie seems most at ease while on
the court, and while the sport she loves may be forever tainted, her
refusal to allow one man's actions to take away her one great joy is
defiantly empowering.
Julie Keeps Quiet is in UK/ROI
cinemas from April 25th.
