Movies into Film

Being Julia

Directed by István Szabó

Canada/Hungary/UK, 2004

Annette Bening in Being Julia (Sony Pictures Classics)

Being Julia gives Annette Bening her sexiest, most winsome comic role since The Grifters. She plays Julia Lambert, a star of the London stage, circa 1938. In the tradition of British heroines who have it all, Julia’s bored, terribly bored with the tedium of her social set. The screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, supplies Bening with plenty of claw-sharpening material. When a supper club patron condescendingly asks Julia if her father had been a country doctor, Bening retorts, “He was a vet—he used to go to your house to deliver the bitches.”

Harwood and the director István Szabó (they last collaborated on Taking Sides) have made a lovely film about a woman in the midst of middle age. Julia spends quite a bit of time regarding her face in the mirror; we get to know her laugh lines and the pucker of her lips fairly well. She falls in and out of love with a much younger man. She regains, loses and regains again her lust for life; the movie ultimately concerns itself with her elaborate, long-percolating revenge against a rival and the heroine’s subsequent transcendence. What comes won’t be unpredictable for the viewer of even average sophistication, but the whole point, the pleasure principle, spins around the sheer bliss Bening/Julia takes in destroying her opponent. And as unlikely candidates as Szabó and Harwood seem for the task, they succeed on the same ground where Something’s Gotta Give dismally failed. In some shots, Bening, in russet curls and small circular shades, resembles Diane Keaton, albeit a Keaton who has aged well.

Bening and Jeremy Irons (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)

Costumer John Bloomfield and production designer Luciana Arrighi lavishly recreate pre-war period glamour in which to cloak Being Julia. Szabó revels in this lost world of country houses for the summer and kitschy melodramas for over-actors. He knows this leisured innocence will be ended by the events then re-shaping Europe, but there’s only one allusion to that on-screen. The filmmakers allow Julia and company to gather their rosebuds while they may, undisturbed by foreshadowing. In an image that sums up the idyll, Szabó frames a medium-to-long composition of two lovers kissing by a canal, their legs dangling over the bank and all of nature spread out vast behind them—as, I might add, the soundtrack hums with an era-appropriate recording of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

Although it’s Bening’s show all the way, the other actors are fine. Michael Gambon takes great joy in the role of Julia’s long dead and much missed theatre coach. His ghost keeps popping up to lecture her on technique, even when she’s on a crying jag. Jeremy Irons, as Julia’s decidedly platonic husband, has little juice until the post-climax in her backstage dressing room. The two of them finally seem married in this scene: they look as if they want to eat each other alive. And cabaret singer Alison Jiear’s warm contralto voice graces the final scene, imbuing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” with more empathy than the song usually receives. – NPT

October 13, 2004

Movies into Film

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