JULIE KEEPS QUIET Review: Tennis Phenom, Insightful, Incisive Character Study

Among major professional sports played around the world, tennis stands out for its unique set of demands on its respective athletes.

 

Unlike team sports or even doubles tennis, singles tennis places full responsibility for success or failure on the individual players themselves. One part physical (talent, training, skill), one part mental (anticipating angles of attack, ball placement, spin and ball speed, among others), and one part psychological (concentration, resiliency, flexibility), tennis played at the highest professional levels offers myriad rewards for both players and spectators.

 

For the eponymous tennis player (Tessa Van den Broeck), a promising teen phenom at an exclusive tennis academy, in Belgian writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl’s (Stephanie, Umpire, Get Ripped) impressively realized, multi-layered character study, Julie Keeps Quiet (orig. Julie zwijgt), a different kind of pressure comes into play (pun partly intended).

 

The untimely death of another, once-promising phenom, Aline, leaves Julie’s tennis coach, Jeremy (Laurent Caron), under suspicion for abuse. It also leaves Julie, the coach’s current, most promising player, at odds, both with herself and with the Powers-That-Be investigating the claims against the coach and by extension, given her proximity and relationship with her coach, the likelihood of Julie’s abuse and victimization.

 

Unsurprisingly, the title itself gives away the central premise of Van Dijl’s film. While friends, family, and acquaintances, specifically the senior administrative staff at the academy, relentlessly push and prod Julie into talking about her experiences with the now disgraced coach, she repeatedly refuses, throwing herself into honing her skills through practice, and otherwise feigning normalcy. In play-acting normality, Julie hopes that the pretense will, with time, effort, and the same level of focus and concentration she puts into refining her tennis game and turning professional, become “normal” or a reasonable enough facsimile from the abuse scandal.

 

She’s both right and wrong, of course. Pretense doubles as a not unfamiliar defense mechanism, allowing her to avoid and evade confronting the hard, ugly truths about the abuse she may or may not have experienced with her ex-coach, her role in her victimization (i.e., survivor’s guilt), and ultimately, reconciling those experiences with and within her identity and adhering to an all-too-common, often insufficient idea, “moving on” with her life and fully refocusing herself on her career.

 

Buoyed by a keen observational eye into the ins-and-outs, ebbs and flows, and daily rhythms of tennis academy life, a trait typical of Julie Keeps Quiet’s award-wining producers and filmmaking duo, the Dardennes Brothers (L'Enfant, Rosetta, La Promesse), as well as a grounded, naturalistic performance from Tessa Van den Broeck, a tennis player making her feature-length debut here, and a talented cast equal to the demands of a taut, tense script that hangs on the simple, if potentially life-changing question suggested by the title, Julie Keeps Quiet provides worthwhile, even invaluable insight into a corner of the world rarely depicted on screen.