Julie Keeps Quiet
Directed by Leonardo Van Dijl
Written by Leonardo Van Dijl, Ruth Becquart
Starring Tessa Van den Broeck, Ruth Becquart, Koen De Bouw, Laurent Caron
Not yet rated
Runtime: 1 hour and 37 minutes
Opens March 28th (exclusive one week run at Metrograph in Theaters)

by Jill Vranken , Staff Writer

CW: abuse, brief mention of suicide

“Why is Jérémy suspended?”

In Julie Keeps Quiet, Belgian director Leonardo Van Dijl’s feature debut, we follow Julie Devriendt (Tessa Van den Broeck), a teenage tennis prodigy. As the star player at her elite youth tennis academy, Julie lives and breathes her sport, balancing her intense practice with her school work. Her aim is to make it into the Belgian Tennis Federation, which seems like a sure thing, until her coach Jérémy (Laurent Caron) is suddenly suspended after the suicide of Aline, another of his protégées.

As Julie’s teammates are asked to provide testimonies about their experiences with Jérémy for the investigation, Julie makes the remarkable decision to keep quiet. And despite rising suspicions from her loved ones that her relationship with her coach was inappropriate at best, Julie’s silence begins to speak volumes. Anxiety and confusion gnaw away at the teen, threatening the very thing she’s worked so hard for.

Tessa Van den Broeck is remarkable in her acting debut; the fifteen-year-old is herself a skilled tennis player and brings that physicality to the role of Julie. We are introduced to her as she is alone on the tennis court, practicing movements without a racket or a ball. The camera is static (and will remain static for pretty much the whole movie), focused entirely on her as she mimes shots. Even when she runs out of frame, the camera stays rooted—almost as if it’s waiting for her to come back.

Van Dijl keeps Van den Broeck the visual focus of the story throughout—she is in every scene, often in close up, with other characters in frame but kept in the background. It’s a lot to ask from a novice, but Van den Broeck rises up to the challenge. Keeping aligned with the movie’s central themes of silences and absences, of what isn’t said and avoided, her performance is quiet on the surface, but in her eyes and her body language, you see a storm brewing.

Julie Keeps Quiet never says outright what it is that transpired between coach Jérémy and Aline, or what the nature of his relationship with Julie is. But the movie doesn’t need to—Van Dijl trusts his audience to pay attention and to put the pieces of the puzzle together themselves. The closest we come to anything being said is when Julie meets Jérémy at a cafe, alone, and he mentions having “stopped when she asked to.” Jérémy is still in regular, unsupervised contact with her, planting words in her ear about how she is not to trust anything her replacement coach Backie (Pierre Gervais) is telling her during training.

Julie feels all eyes on her—she is the new Aline, the new star pupil. She realizes that testifying may come to define her future, yet is bristling at anything that could be perceived as favoritism towards her, knowing full well what that looks like in light of the allegations made towards Jérémy. And while the academy wants to be seen as supportive during the process, never outright forcing Julie to change her mind, it is still in their best interest to not push further into uncovering any systemic abuse as it would highlight a complicit neglect of their duty of care.

It’s rare that I get the opportunity to talk about a movie made in my home country, and as a Belgian, I feel strangely proud of Julie Keeps Quiet. It’s a movie in the tradition of Belgian filmmaking legends the Dardenne brothers, stripped back and focused on the emotional truth at the core of the story: that there are many ways to keep a silence, and that the burden of keeping it can be very heavy indeed.

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