2024 certainly is the year of tennis films. After Luca Guadagnino gave us the critically acclaimed Challengers earlier this year, director/co-writer Leonardo Van Dijl now brings the game’s high intensity to the big screen in Julie Keeps Quiet. In his directional debut, Belgium’s submission for the Academy Awards 2025 in the “Best International Feature” category, van Dijl combines teenage angst, the (external) pressure on a top athlete and the #metoo movement. While the latter aspect is the most present throughout the script, van Dijl and his co-writer Ruth Becquart use it subtly but still very effectively resulting in a tense, tight and impactful drama.
Cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis’s (Triple 9, Bullhead) camera follows teenager Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck), who’s a promising young tennis player who’s preparing herself for the possible life-changing try-out for the BFT, the Belgian Tennis Federation. However, her life changes completely differently. Her coach, Jeremy (Laurent Caron), is being suspended right before the all-important moment in response to the suicide of a young girl training at Julie’s academy.
While her fellow tennis players are coming forward to talk about their experiences with Jeremy, Julie doesn’t. As the title already reveals, Julie’s silence is the centre of this feature. She is incredibly confident and creates loads of buzz on-court, yet she’s a complete nervous wreck off-court, despite her not showing it to the people around her. While she comes to terms with what happened, she starts withdrawing from her friends, parents, tennis players, and coaches around her. Because she keeps quiet, it’s challenging to know what’s going on in Julie’s head, but Karakatsanis and Van Dijl ensure that the audience can feel her hollowness, confinement and mixed feelings strongly.
They often capture Julie sitting in a dimly lit room, a shadow outside, or she hitting balls alone. This way of capturing the tennis prodigy makes you feel her isolation, on both physical and emotional levels, even more. The filmmaker beautifully uses his lead character to examine complex and powerful issues such as power dynamics, sexual abuse, and the pressure young players face in high-stakes competitive tennis (and the sports industry in general).
Because of the isolation and withdrawal, Julie only communicates with stoical glances, “I’m fine”, and non-words. During the handful of brief conversations she has with her parents, colleagues or friends, you can feel the doubt, pain and uncertainty the tennis player has to deal with because of Van den Broeck’s touching line delivery. However, especially during the more silent scenes, she truly excels in her debut feature. Her layered acting is highly telling and secretive, done by design.
With every look, silent moment, or hit with her racket, she makes you wonder if Julie has been hurt the same way as the girl, if she keeps quiet to save her tennis career or if the relationship between her and her coach is more than purely professional. Each gesture, touch and glance speak louder than any words could have done. While Julie keeps to herself and the depths of her silence remain unclear, you get a glimpse of how she feels. With a remarkable performance, Van den Broeck brings her character’s struggle beautifully and captivatingly to life.
Van den Broeck being a tennis player herself is a massive advantage for this movie. When looking at Julie’s play, the film finds its power, tension, speed and confidence, especially because Van den Broeck feels at home in the naturalistic-looking tennis scenes. Without hesitation, she attacks the balls, hits that volley or scores an ace, and those aspects certainly give the movie the necessary kick. During those fast-paced scenes, the camera focuses solely on Julie as it always stays on her side of the net. Julie and her repressed feelings remain the primary focus, as the camera does not go back and forth. Also, because of this ‘simple’ way of filming, you genuinely get a sense of the game’s intensity, tenacity, and loneliness and the gruelling athleticism that is tennis.
While there are no concrete allegations in the feature made against Jeremy, both the visuals (including illicit texts between Julie and Jeremy) and Van den Broeck’s beautiful emotional and physical performance make you slowly discover Julie’s physical and mental control and the trauma and pain lurking behind the silence. This reserved way of delivering Julie’s story allows the audience to draw their conclusion without pushing the viewers in one direction or another.
While your patience is certainly tested throughout many moments, Julie Keeps Quiet is nevertheless a carefully crafted but powerfully portrayed character study about the troubled relationship between a promising young female athlete and a man in a position of power. The movie might not show you the explicit violence or abuse happening. Still, Van Dijl gets the complex message and the importance of having more conversations about people in Julie’s position across in a touching, sensitive and well-executed way.
Julie Keeps Quiet is part of the BFI London Film Festival 2024 and will be released in the US in 2025 (date TBC) courtesy of Film Movement.
Director: Leonardo Van Dijl
Writers: Leonardo Van Dijl, Ruth Becquart
Rated: NR
Runtime: 100m
While your patience is certainly tested throughout many moments, Julie Keeps Quiet is nevertheless a carefully crafted but powerfully portrayed character study about the troubled relationship between a promising young female athlete and a man in a position of power.
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GVN Rating
Subtitle translator by day. Film journalist by night.
