MUBI

There are few actresses working today who are as spellbinding to watch as Tilda Swinton. It has taken me far too long to watch what may be her most gripping performance so far in “Julia,” a thriller that immediately draws you in, and then dares you to look away.

Julia Harris (Tilda Swinton) is an alcoholic who spends her nights partying at bars and nightclubs, only to wake up in bed next to strange men in the morning. She has very little self respect, and early in the film she loses her job. Her only friend Mitch (Saul Rubinek) is an ex-alcoholic who helps her out financially, but threatens to cut her off after she is fired, unless she goes to AA meetings to get help for her drinking problem. It is at one of these meetings where she meets Elena, an unstable woman who asks Julia for help in a scheme to kidnap her 11-year-old son Tom (Aidan Gould), who was taken away from her to live with his wealthy grandfather.

In return for her help, Elena tells Julia that she can pay her $50,000, which she claims is a portion of a large inheritance she has received. After much contemplation, Julia decides that the money outweighs any consequence, but of course the half-baked plan goes from the start, and Julia ends up on the run in Mexico with Tom tied up in her trunk, and a gun that she struggles to figure out how to load.

At one point in the film, Mitch confronts Julia about her choice to go along with Elena’s plot to get her son back. He says, “We all knew that Elena’s stupid, insane story about getting her kid back was bullshit, we heard it over and over again at meetings. Why is it that you were the only one that believed her?” Julia is not a stupid woman, but a desperate one who gets in over her head. We do not like Julia, we do not sympathize with her, and we want her to pay the price for what she has done. But there are times when we somehow want her to get through this ordeal in one piece, and of course, we hope see poor Tom returned safely to his grandfather.

This is the first work I have seen by French filmmaker Erick Zonka, and it won’t be the last. His direction is sharp and revealing, as he stages some astonishing scenes of tension, urgency and realism. The script by Zonka and Aude Py is incredibly sincere, the cinematography by Yorick Le Saux is superb, and the U.S. and Mexico locations give the whole experience the stark authenticity that is requires. It is hard not to believe everything that happens to Julia in the film, as it all seems so inevitable based on the choices she makes. That is great screenwriting, and why Swinton likely decided to take on such a challenging and bitter role. There is an interesting story going on in “Julia,” and the central character is caught in a web of debt and self-deceit, which she turns outward at the chance to get some money and to turn her luck and her life around.

Taking on this complex character, Swinton is a force beyond all categories. Aside from much of her earlier work, I have seen most of the films she has done—I still need to find the time to watch “I Am Love” and “Broken Flowers”—and she has never once done something that is any less than interesting. This may be her finest performance yet, from what I have seen, and that is saying a lot. Consider her Oscar winning work in “Michael Clayton,” her hilarious performance in “Burn After Reading” and her scene-stealing work in both “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and the action-horror movie “Constantine.” Connecting the dots, I think that we can expect more great things from Swinton.

Why this stunning, pulse-pounding film did not garner more attention when it was released in 2008 puzzles me, but should anyone feel uncertain about its accessibility, rest assured that “Julia” is as approachable as any great mainstream thriller in recent years, and on top of that, it stars Tilda Swinton. You just can’t go wrong.

As shamelessly biased as I am towards the monumental abilities of our transcendent goddess of cinephilia that is La Tilda of Swinton, I was still a little in awe of her raw, not to mention brave, performance as Julia. She is utterly convincing as, let’s be honest here, a quite a repulsive woman. Someone who, at the very least, is profoundly flawed – a self-centered alcoholic lush who cares about no-one and wears her propensity towards self-destruction on her sleeve. Who then goes one step further towards obliterating any last vestiges of sympathy she may have elicited from the people around her and us, the audience, by doing the unthinkable – kidnapping a child for ransom.
If that isn’t bad enough, the rough treatment she metes out on the boy verges on cruelty and spite and her carelessness with him is unflinching (locking him in the boot of her car till he shits himself, screaming obscenities at him while waving a gun in his face, gagging him and leaving him tied to the radiator of the motel room, abandoning him in the Mexican desert at night). It’s deeply upsetting to watch and you wonder how you can engage with this mascara smeared devil. And yet, yes, we are still rooting for her?? Highsmith fans will be smacking their chops with relish.
It’s not until the last 40 minutes or so, when the mother instinct breaks through the seemingly hard-as-nails but still very brittle exterior, that her humanity and compassion spills out at last. (It’s been an emotional slog getting there so our relief is palpable). As she awakes (from a night of filth with her Mexican trick) and her poor wretched captive tyke is lead in to her, bathed in the warm orange and yellow glows of a South American sunrise, the dispossessed lush and motherless son seem to bond. It’s a profoundly moving scene (reminding me a little of the restorative feel that the later scenes in ‘Irreversible’ invoked) and just about stops you wanting to kick Julia into submission. Can Julia redeem herself? Unfortunately for them, it may be too late for redemption as events take a terrible turn and spiral even further out of Julia’s control. Will anyone get out of this one alive?
The ending is frustratingly abrupt but also kind of perfect – I’d love to know how things panned out. But whatever happens next is a whole different story of course and nothing is better than imagination for filling in the gaps.