| Julia and Julia | |
|---|---|
Italian Poster |
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| Directed by | Peter Del Monte |
| Produced by | Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) |
| Written by | Peter Del Monte Silvia Napolitano Sandro Petraglia |
| Starring | Kathleen Turner Gabriel Byrne Sting |
| Music by | Maurice Jarre |
| Cinematography | Giuseppe Rotunno |
| Editing by | Michael Chandler |
| Release date(s) | February 5, 1988 |
| Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $901,364[1] |
Julia and Julia (Italian: Giulia e Giulia) is a 1987 Italian drama film directed by Peter Del Monte. The screenplay by Silvia Napolitano, Sandro Petraglia, Joseph Minion, and Del Monte is based on a story by Napolitano.
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Grief-stricken Julia, an American widowed on her wedding day when her husband Paolo is killed in a car accident, lives and works in Trieste. Six years later she returns to her apartment to discover a strange woman living there. Across the street, in the elegant home she and Paolo had purchased and which she never sold, she finds him and their young son, treating her as if they have been together all along. Paolo is a workaholic dedicated to his career as a ship designer and a restless Julia has taken British photographer Daniel as a lover.
Bewildered but happy to have her husband back, Julia tries to mend her marriage, but suddenly finds herself once again widowed and alone. As she slips back and forth between two different worlds, she finds it increasingly difficult to determine which is reality and which is fantasy and begins to question her sanity.
The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 1987. A dubbed version was given limited release in the United States in January of the following year by Cinecom Pictures and earned $901,364 [2]. It was released in foreign markets as Giulia e Giulia.
This was the first feature shot using the Sony HDVS wideband analog High-definition video technique and then transferred to 35 mm film [3].
In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film "a not-very-spooky melodrama" and added, "[it] is minor movie making, but it does prove two things: that Kathleen Turner has become the kind of star who can carry even third-rate fiction without losing her beautiful, voluptuous cool, and that high-definition tape (on which this was initially shot) can be transferred to film and look as good as anything shot on film to start with." [4]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "The construction of the story is ingenious and perverse and has a kind of inner logic of its own . . . This is the kind of movie that proves unbearably frustrating to some people, who demand explanations and resent obscurity. I have seen so many movies recently in which absolutely everything could be predicted that I found Julia and Julia perversely entertaining." [5]
In the Washington Post, Rita Kempley described the film as "peculiar" and added, "The unstable Julia must have seemed like a juicy opportunity for Turner, who likes to test herself with diverse roles." [6]
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