Julia (2014)

This is not the other current film called Julia, which is a documentary about well known cook, writer and television personality, Julia Child. This Julia is a glossy, slickly made rape-revenge film starring Ashley Williams.

So it pretty much goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that there are likely to be trigger warnings for rape and sexual violence.

Rape-revenge films are always going to be challenging.  I am not opposed to the topic of rape being used in art.  After all, I like films in which people are terrorized, tortured and murdered.  Rape is, on an objective level, just another terrible thing that can be done by one human being to another.  it is interesting to observe, however, as a society how we seem far more comfortable with murder and evisceration than we are with rape.

We'll laugh at some dumb lummox getting chopped into little pieces, and jeer as the blubber about it.  But as soon as rape is involved it becomes much more .... problematic.  It's hard to imagine a watchable horror film where rape is presented as comedy, the way that murder often is - or in the casual way that death is dispensed in slasher films.  the only handy example I can think of is the lamentable Bunny, the Killer Thing, about which I have already said more than it deserves.  

This is a revealing dissonance.  Murder is uncommon, but comic.  Rape is something far more common, but still something that we are struggling to talk about, or make films about, responsibly.

(n.b. I'm not recommending we make rape comedies.  Though there have been more than a few films that have sailed close to the line.  The fabulous The Philedephia Story has Jimmy Stewart bearing an unconscious Kathrine Hepburn bedroomward; we only have his word the "so-called 'affair" consisted of exactly two kisses and a late swim."  Dead Poets' Society included a moment where one of the frustrated, virginal boys makes out with a comatose girl at a party.  At the time, it was presented as comedy and quite the done thing.  And Sixteen Candles alludes to the concept of raping unconscious females as wonderfully comedic ... So perhaps we have made some very, very slight progress over the that 40 years.)

So, what I am trying to say here is I am not prudish.  I find films that focus on rape very uncomfortable, but I've always thought part of the horror genre' job was to reflect society's fears, hypocrisies and double standards.  You can tell a lot about a society from what it puts into its horror films.  But that license to break taboos and portray shocking things has to be used carefully.  One does not tie a naked woman to a frame, inverted, arms and legs spread, and then chainsaw her in two starting at the vagina.  Oh, they did that.  That's the witless, nasty creepy clown flick The Terrifier for you.  Don't watch it.

Julia is a nurse.  We first meet her gliding up an escalator, staring unblinkingly through the camera.  It's a beautiful shot, the first of many in this film about awful things.

Stare at this still for a minute.  That's pretty much how the film opens.

It is also symptomatic one of the underlying problem of the film.  See how perfectly constructed she is, huddled in her jacket and sheltering behind her scarf, her (we later learn, non-prescription) glasses shielding her face like the curtain wall of a medieval castle, stark eyes staring out from the wings of hair that obscure - rather than frame - her face?  An all held up for us on display in an achingly long, stationary shot as she stares back at us, a Rorschach onto which we can ascribe whatever emotion we want - nervous tension, intense determination, indifference, boredom dead-eyed resignation ... 

Its perhaps the best moment of the film, rendering the relationship between the viewer and the viewed disagreeably even.  We stare at Julia, knowing what is going to happen to her.  She stares back at us, judging us for our voyeurism and anticipation.  Director Matthew Brown obviously thinks so too - he repeats the shot later on, albeit with Julia now sporting a different get up.

The shot is so artful, so carefully constructed; the whole film is viewed through a gauzy veil of unreality.  Later on we see Julia lurking in night clubs tastefully graffitied and self-consciously trashed; all the characters ridiculously on fleek; streets neon-drenched and stylishly trashy.  The whole thing feels unreal and hallucinatory, a sort of reversal of Taxi driver's grimy realism.  This is not helped by the director's use of slow motion to wind everything down.  Going up an escalator, walking across a dance floor ... almost any moment can be drawn out to portentous lengths.

The power balance established between object and objectifier in that tantalizing opening shot is soon disrupted, as Julia arrives at tastefully frat-boy chic staged apartment of Pierce.

This is the happy ending of a romantic comedy, right?

After wandering about the apartment letting red light wash over her in an arty way, she barely has time to enjoy a glass of champagne before she is drugged, gang raped and left to die on a beach - the rapists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by making sure she was dead and putting her corpse well beyond reach.  Because of this short term thinking, Julia survives and limps home.  She makes a connection to a mysterious organization, run by maverick Dr Sgundud, who offers her a decidedly unconventional solution to her trauma - become an avenging angel, actively seeking out abusers pre-emptively punishing them before they can harm women.  He emphasizes a curious caveat - Julia is not permitted to target the men who raped her.  Of course, she ignores this injunction.

Ultimately, the power dynamics are flipped again and the concept of Julia as a canvas onto which others project their own desires resurfaces.  Her rapists seems bizarrely quick to accept her invitation to meet with her again and accept her claim that her encounter with them changed her fundamentally at face value.  Clearly, the implication that sex with them - even coerced sex under the influence of paralyzing drugs followed by being dumped on amid the freezing waves - must be the high point of any girl's life.  Its the most extreme representation of an idea recurring throughout the film, of women as baubles for men's pleasure.  Without this dynamic, the film would not work - the 'sisterhood' pick up their marks in bars where the most casual approach is deemed sufficient groups for violent retribution.

This has drawn some predictable criticism of the film, with people complaining of 'misandry' in the comments section of more nuanced reviews.  But - as is often the case with howlers in the comments section - that is to miss the point.  they are deploying the same crude, reductive ideas celebrated in books purporting to reveal the secrets of the 'pick-up artist' - if she dresses trashy, she's up for it; if she looks at you, she's into to you; if she doesn't want to, do it anyway.  The women target their victims using the same criteria used by misogynistic 'players' plying their craft in any bar on any night.  men are reduced to knucklehead predators or predators to be with the alacrity which sees women reduced to slags and goers.

Which brings us to the presentation of sex in Julia.  This is, for me, the most problematic part of the film.  Not the rape scene itself, which is only shown briefly, in flashbacks.  Unlike the rest of the film, the rape is not presented in a glossy, stylized manner - it is crudely simplistic, with cold basic lighting, dull tones and simple camera work and framing.  Much of the time, we are simply looking at Julia's face - expressionless and slack, as she is jolted about by her unseen attackers.  Drugged but aware of what is happening to her, Julia simply lies there as she is assaulted, reduced, finally, to what her abusers view all women as - a piece of warm meat put there for their pleasure, something to assert power over because they can.

It is hard to make a rape film without including the rape itself and I think Julia manages to get the balance right between exploitative nastiness and making sure the viewers are fully aware what has happened to her.  The problems come later, in a couple of scenes where I think the film steps over a line.  The first is a scene where Julia is 'tested' by picking up a mark, luring him back to an apartment to have sex with him and then kill him.  The brutality of the scene is not the problem here - the eroticism is.  The scene is presented in the manner of a traditional - albeit graphic - love scene.

It could be argued, I suppose, that Julia is feigning passion to keep her victim distracted, but the camera work and framing reinforce the interpretation that this is mostly for the (male) viewer's pleasure - we are finally rewarded for our patience by a good old fashioned fuck scene, with lingering nipple shots, high resolution visuals and porn angles.

Even more telling, there would have been a perfect device to film the scene in a less exploitative way - it is being video by members of the 'sisterhood' as 'insurance.'  it would have been simple enough to film the sequence from the point of view of the camera being used in the scene.  Missing a trick that obvious seems to be deliberate.

And then there is the inevitable lesbian love subtext, in which Juia discovers her passion for the sleek, sexy Sadie, and makes out with her, still smeared with the blood of the victim whose penis she has just hacked off.  It's ... garish and tacky and belongs in a silly lurid teenage fantasy.

Hot?  Yeah!  Right for a film about surviving rape?  Hmmmm ...

It's hard to imagine a trauma victim like Julia being able to respond sensually to anyone, and particularly under the circumstances described.

Also there is a 'big reveal' at the end which I will spoiler:

In her final confrontation with Dr Sgundud, he reveals as a child he liked to wear female clothing.  His father mutilated his genitals to either punish or cure him of this 'affliction.' It's a jarring moment (especially as we get a visual) and smacks of all manner of backwards thinking. When Hitchcock (or Robert Bloch) had Norman Bates wear his mummy's dresses in 1961, it was groundbreaking, forcing society to acknowledge what it felt should be a dirty little secret; when Wes Craven used a transexual killer in Deadly Blessing in 1984 it was still probably just about transgressive, confronting society with its fears and hypocrisies. I am not defending these films particularly - their portrayal of queer and trans characters is - to say the least - problematic. But they have the partial excuse of being made in a time when any representation was a challenge to society's preference to sweep all under the carpet. It just seems unbelievably backwards that - in 2014 - film makers were still fixating on this outdated, bigoted trope. Couldn't Sgundud just have been an evil manipulative monster in his own right, without having to be acting out some elaborate revenge fantasy against daddy?

As a final aside, it's was noted over on Culture Crypt that Julia fails to deliver one of the crucial ingredients of a rape-revenge film - female agency.  Julia (the character, this time) is virtually inert until spurred into action by others.  She can't find help for herself (and it is indicated she's been abused frequently in the past, which makes it harder to feel sympathy for her.)  She doesn't seek out men to exact revenge on until instructed to do it by Sgundud and his valkyries. 

She finds herself trapped, helpless and doomed at the climax and has to be rescued.

She doesn't even initiate the affair with Sadie.  And when she does take the initiate to avenge herself on her abusers, she stuffs up.  On the surface, she's pretty much useless as a protagonist.  I don't see that as a fatal weakness.  I think it can be read as the fundamental theme of the film being reiterated in different forms - that women in this hyper-masculine environment created in the film are powerless and trapped, objects of male gaze, desire and use.  Whatever power they try to accrue can be taken away from them in the twinkling of a male eye.  And that, at least, makes Julia a moral film.

I really, really wanted this film to be much better than it is.  In a genre where a dire monstrosity like I Spit On Your grave is still a touchstone, we need films like Julia, which are not witless and are well made.  But while it tries in places to be that film, it makes many wrong steps as well - mostly when it needed to be at its most agile and well balanced.  But it does still seem to be trying to say something, rather than merely shock or revel in depravity.

Star Rating: **