‘Julie Keeps Quiet’: Cannes Review

Dir. Leonardo van Dijl. Belgium/Sweden 2024. 100mins

With a style as tantalisingly reserved as its heroine, Belgian drama Julie Keeps Quiet should make a mark as a standout of Critics Week 2024. A confident debut by writer-director Leonardo van Dijl, known for 2020 short Stephanie, it is tautly controlled in its treatment of a current hot-button theme – the sometimes problematic relationships between young sports talents and their mentors.

A standout of Critics Week 2024

The film is distinguished by a rigorously discreet style, well-handled ensemble casting and a lead from young debut actor and real-life tennis talent Tessa van den Broeck that is all the more effective for its lack of demonstrativeness. While much more restrained-in its appeal to audience emotions, Julie could score niche exposure comparable with another recent Belgian debut, Laura Wandel’s not dissimilarly pitched Playground (2021). Jour2Fete will release in France.

With dialogue in Flemish and French, the film is set largely in a top-range academy for young tennis players, where teenager Julie (van den Broeck) stands out as an exceptionally promising talent. She seems well set to achieve her dream of selection by the Belgian Tennis Federation but, as the film starts, there are whispers around the school that her coach Jérémy (Laurent Caron) has been suspended. It also turns out that Aline, another star player taught by Jérémy, has killed herself.

This places the school on an emergency footing, with an investigation pending and students urged to report anything they can. Julie, however, prefers to say nothing, and commits herself to pursuing her training – this time under sympathetic, easy-going young coach Backie (Pierre Gervais). Hints of Jérémy’s attitude emerge in a phone conversation with Julie (he is heard long before he is seen) telling her to ignore Backie’s teaching and being equally disparaging about the school’s head Sophie (Claire Bodson).

While viewers might feel early on that they know exactly what is at issue, the film is all the more effective from keeping the topic and its specifics under wraps, drawing the same curtain over it that Julie does – by contrast with, say, Charlène Favier’s much more explicit Slalom (2020), about a teenage skier and her coach. Here, the matter that emerges clearly is that of psychological control, although a later conversation between Julie and Jérémy gives clues to what else might be at stake.

Julie is the centre of this story, so much so that other students – some seemingly her close friends – are not fully differentiated as characters, but remain part of a hazily-sketched ensemble. This is very much part of the film’s dramatic approach, identifying Julie as isolated among her peers; something also accomplished in the cinematography of Nicolas Karakatzanis (Bullhead; I, Tonya). With colours muted, and figures sometimes merging into ambient darkness, Julie is characteristically picked out in sharper focus than those around her, as if existing on a different plane of presence. Occasional images are a little more deliberately stylised, for example a shot at ground level showing a court’s surface scattered with yellow balls.

With its downbeat visuals and refusal to communicate too directly or emotively, van Dijl’s film is reminiscent of the early dramas of Michel Franco (e.g. After Lucia), as well as Playground, in its tightly controlled use of on- and offscreen space. Scripted by the director and Ruth Becquart, who also plays Julie’s mother, the story comes in a succession of brief scenes, each of which reveal only so much.

In between these, occasional long takes on the tennis court show the real lifeblood of Julie’s existence, with its intense regime of highly focused activity at odds with her seeming impassiveness and reluctance to communicate. With van den Broeck heading a cast of strikingly gifted young tennis players, the film makes a point about the different ways that young people might express themselves – or decline to – both verbally and physically. Van den Broeck’s strong but deeply understated performance crackles with compressed tension, signalling her character’s powerful will as well as her uncertainty and vulnerability. Julie’s silence, and that of the film, are punctuated by sparing, unsettling passages from Caroline Shaw, the acclaimed US composer and specialist in a capella voice works, who recently scored TV miniseries Fleischman Is In Trouble.