Julia Erick Zonca France/USA 2008
With greying roots in her red hair and wearing high heels that betray her when she's had one too many, Julia Harris is a complete mess.
We meet her at a bar in full swing, dragging a married man around by his tie. The next morning they awake in a heap in his car outside the apartment block where Julia lives. As she stumbles in her heels across the car park she pauses by her own car - which is where she normally sleeps after nights like that. "I don't have anything, I get drunk and I'm getting old" she says of herself.
On another occasion, she awakes on somebody else's couch with a pounding hangover, to be asked, will you kidnap my son? She is offered money by a desperate Mexican neighbour to help snatch her young son. The neighbour seems confident that nothing can go wrong. Clearly it does and that's the film: one long hangover of mishaps as Julia double crosses the mother and screws up the random demands.
Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, as Julia, plays a character struggling to sober up. She absconds with the son, Tom, and she gets to know him. But then Stockholm Syndrome plays out in reverse as she starts to care for him. Her newfound maternal instincts are duly tested when events violently spiral out of control in Mexico.
The film is the latest is a line of populist yet slightly daring films in which Swinton has appeared. In between the crowd pleasers such as the Chronicles of Narnia films, she pops up in quirky prestige flicks like Burn After Reading. Julia is one of the latter and we're expecting a grand emotional journey and that is exactly what is delivered.
It's refreshing to watch Swinton not playing yet another cold ice queen (as she literally does in the Narnia films) but it takes a while for the audience get attuned. She's a horrible person doing a horrible thing. The film really starts to work when she bonds with Tom. But despite her throwing herself in the role, taking her seriously as a failing alcoholic is hard. There's simply too much baggage from her other films, even with her imposing physical presence (which is written into the script).
Technically Swinton's performance is great but you're never quite sure if she's suddenly going to snap out of it. You keep expecting her to take charge, which she does of course by the end.
