Julie Keeps Qui­et review – a slick, steely piece of storytelling

This is a #MeToo film that’s entire­ly focused on the expe­ri­ence of the vic­tims, spend­ing lit­tle-to-no time wor­ry­ing about whether the per­pe­tra­tor has been ​“can­celled”. Leonar­do Van Dijl’s film is about how dif­fi­cult it is to speak up and tell your sto­ry, even when there are signs and sig­nals com­ing from all angles say­ing that now is the right time to do so. But also, it empathis­es with and respects those who have their rea­sons for remain­ing qui­et, what­ev­er those rea­sons may be.

Julie (Tes­sa Van den Broeck) is a high school ten­nis ace who’s sprint­ing up the lad­der of Wallonia’s finest. A prover­bial span­ner is thrown into the works of her progress when head coach Jere­my (Lau­rent Caron) is sus­pend­ed due to some sus­pect­ed foul play with one of the club’s oth­er young stars. The mat­ter is rather urgent, since that vic­tim end­ed her own life for rea­sons that no-one is quite cer­tain of, but every­one is able to make edu­cat­ed guesses.

In terms of the film’s som­bre, depres­sive tone, this is the mir­ror oppo­site of 2024’s oth­er big ten­nis movie, Chal­lengers. One major dif­fer­ence is that where Luca Guadagni­no chore­o­graphed ten­nis match­es as a fran­tic, ardu­ous bal­let, Van Dijl films it as a metro­nom­ic, art­less dirge which is all about strain­ing the human body until it reach­es the point of break­ing. The rhyth­mic thwack of the ten­nis balls stands in for the tick-tock of Jeremy’s inevitable reckoning.

The thing that makes the film work so well is that you always under­stand why Julie refus­es to talk about her own expe­ri­ences with Jere­my, even when the film refus­es to spoon-feed you her pri­vate ratio­nale. It’s about not want­i­ng to rock any boats, not want­i­ng to divert atten­tion away from her ten­nis and her dri­ve for suc­cess, and maybe even not want­i­ng to see Jere­my be pun­ished more than he already has.

Van den Broeck’s per­for­mance is one of tight­ly coiled rage which is nev­er direct­ly expressed. Her face remains a blank slate through­out. It’s an unaf­fect­ed, soft­ly-spo­ken per­for­mance which hints at but nev­er reveals the deep wells of sad­ness and con­fu­sion hid­den beneath. The world of teenage ten­nis cham­pi­ons is paint­ed as an unglam­orous, back-bit­ing place filled with pet­ty jeal­ousies and lots of time spent under­neath ugly strip lights and repeat­ing the same strokes over and over and over again.

It’s not a film that does any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly new, in the duti­ful­ly lin­ear way it tells the sto­ry to the ultra-func­tion­al shoot­ing style. Yet its sat­is­fac­tion comes from its care­ful release of infor­ma­tion, it’s ambi­ence of encroach­ing dread and the sub­tle psy­cho­log­i­cal twists that push Julie ever clos­er to that euphor­ic break­ing point.

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