JULIA AND JULIA

Italy, 1987, 98 minutes, Colour.
Kathleen Turner, Gabriel Byrne, Sting, Gabriele Ferzetti, John Steiner, Yorgo Voyagis.
Directed by Peter del Monte.

Julia and Julia is an Italian production with international appeal, a psychological drama that tantalises but does not explain. Rather, audiences share the bewilderment of Julia, whose husband dies in a car crash immediately after their wedding. Or does he? Six years later, Julia moves between two time zones, one where her husband is dead and another where he and their son Marco are alive and well. A sinister stranger (Sting looking menacing again, as in Brimstone and Treacle, Dune) appears in both worlds ... Kathleen Turner is the troubled Julia. Set in Trieste, the film offers a psychological dilemma that audiences may or may not wish to solve.

1. Psychological drama and mystery?

2. An Italian television/film production? International style? The Trieste locations, the city, the sea? Musical score and atmosphere?

3. Characters and the techniques for Julia's changing character and time zone?

4. The plausibility of the plot? The changes in Julia's mind? Changing characters?

5. The opening, the reading from the Canticle of Canticles, the wedding party, the reference to the grave, the gust and Julia's veil being picked up by Sting? The drive, love, happiness? The crash, the explosion and Julia's grieving?

6. The audience sharing Julia's perspective? Bewildered? Her being separated, her work, friends, the man in her life, Paolo's parents and home? The drive away and the change of time zone?

7. The other world: her not being recognised at work, Paolo's happy parents, the discovery of Paolo at home alive, Marco? The phone call and the unknown man? Paolo and the building, friends coming to meals? A wonderful life?

8. Daniel Osler: the phone calls, her fear, the key of the hotel, his slides of her? meeting him at the tourist agency in the other time zone? Chasing, infatuated? The encounter, the escape (and the theatre crowd)? The sexual encounter with him? the hold over him? Her betraying Paolo and his looking
at her? her decision to change?

9. Her moving in and out of the world, bewildered, going back to work?

10. The build-up and the repeat of sequences with Daniel from the other time zone? The audience shock at her killing him? The elaborate taking of the body and burying him in the sea?

11. Her return home, the happiness, her going shopping, the arrest, dredging the harbour?

12. Julia in prison, the visit of her mother-in-law, her letters to Paolo, her withdrawal into a fantasy world?

13. A character portrait and the experience of split personality?