“Julie Keeps Quiet” - TIFF24 Film Review
This review was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
Is 2024 unofficially the year of tennis cinema? Earlier, Luca Guadagnino made tennis sexy with Challengers, but the sport wasn’t always at the forefront of that film. Nor was it too accurately portrayed. Now, Julie Keeps Quiet just had its North American premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Like Challengers, Julie Keeps Quiet is centered on the sport of tennis, but there is a clear attention to detail in the film that helps build the film into a pressure cooker of a drama.
Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck) is a promising teenage tennis player. She’s poised to take the tennis world by storm and spends all her free time practicing. Her life is thrown for a loop when a scandal occurs at the tennis academy where she practices. An instructor, Jeremy (Laurent Caron), has been suspended following the suicide of an ex-student. All the adults at the academy turn their focus to Julie because she has been closest to him. Now Julie is forced to reflect on her experiences with Jeremy and decide if there’s anything she needs to share with the investigators.
Part of what makes Julie Keep Quiet feel so urgent and tense is Van den Broeck herself. She actually is a tennis player and this is her first acting role. It works to the film’s advantage. When Julie is off the court, she’s a ball of nerves. Beyond the normal anxieties of being a teenager is the realization that maybe her relationship with her coach wasn’t okay. Julie is reserved, desperately trying to hold it all together, but as soon as there’s a racquet in her hands, she’s filled with confidence. She has no hesitation in attacking the ball, sending punishing forehand after punishing forehand across the court. Unlike the tennis in Challengers, director and co-writer Leonardo van Dijl keeps the camera mostly static when Julie plays tennis. The audience, even if they aren’t tennis players, can get a sense of what the sport is like. The intensity, the endurance, the loneliness that are unique to the sport.
courtesy of TIFF
The script from van Dijl and Ruth Becquart (who also plays Liesbeth in the film) is one that very empathetically looks at why victims choose to remain silent. In a perfect world, anyone who experiences abuse would speak up and the abuser would face the consequences of their actions. Of course, anyone who has paid the smallest amount of attention to what happens when (usually) women report sexual assault knows that’s not the case. Julie Keeps Quiet brings to mind the recent trial of the USA Gymnastics coach who was systematically protected by a number of organizations, despite the harm he was causing. Something similar happens in Julie Keeps Quiet. While it seems as though the coaches at Julie’s academy didn’t knowingly protect Jeremy, his suspension isn’t the end of his career. When Julie finds he’s been hired by another local academy, she has a breakdown. It was easy for her to stay silent when he was fired from her club because she believed that would be the end of it. That no one in their right mind would hire him again, but unfortunately, that’s not the case in this fictional story – or in reality.
We need to have more conversations about the relationship between a young person and an adult in a position of power. Julie Keeps Quiet never tells the audience what Jeremy did to the teenage girl who killed herself or what Jeremy did to Julie, but it doesn’t need to. There are subtle moments throughout the film showing that whatever Jeremy did was not okay, and that he made Julie believe nothing was wrong. The audience can tell almost immediately by the way his name is saved under a pseudonym in Julie’s phone and how the simple sound of a text ringtone can turn her into an anxious mess. Julie Keeps Quiet proves that films don’t need to explicitly show violence or abuse in order to make audiences understand the impact they can have on a victim. There is power in not using that type of imagery to get a point across.
A younger man, Backie (Pierre Gervais), is eventually named as Julie’s new coach. At first she’s cautious around him. Jeremy used to make it obvious that she was his favorite, and when Backie asks Julie to demonstrate a kick serve, she worries it’s history repeating itself. Instead, Backie gently explains that all he wants is for her to show her serve because she’s the best at it. Nothing more, nothing less. Not only does Julie Keeps Quiet show the dark side of this type of relationship, it also shows the potential for a healthy one as well. The longer she works with Backie, the lighter Julie becomes. Julie Keeps Quiet shines an essential light on youth sports and the abuse that goes on in them led by an open, generous performance by Van den Broeck.
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