Giulia

I swooned when I saw this. I almost wanted to go to France and find Anna Biella so that I could propose to her. This intensely moody experimental one-hour video begins with a French modern-dance class preparing to go to Rome, but Giulia is mysteriously singled out not to go on the field trip.

Dancing is only one of Giulia's ambitions. Rebelling against her religious-wacko sister Christine and their religious-wacko mom (Tina Aumont, who still looks gorgeous at the age of 50), Giulia aspires to be an actress. I so much admire kids who can talk back to their parents when they need to. She goes to an audition but discovers nothing more than a casting couch. After a few minutes of playing along, she scrams, but promises her casting director anything he wants the next night. The next night is the highlight, for this is when we witness Giulia moonlighting as a live-sex-act performer at a Parisian strip club. (No faking anything during this lengthy sequence. But no graphic close-ups either, thank goodness. I'm sure this was done in one take and with a real audience.) She invites her sleazy casting director to join her on stage, but in his jealousy and shock he chickens out and leaves. Now, here's my confession: When I was a teen, nudity and sex on film were a major turn-on. I'm no longer a teen, and nudity and sex, scripted and posed, no longer do anything for me at all. But then I saw this scene—and I melted.

There are various vignettes as Giulia walks through Paris, chats with a friend, pulverizes a pest in the park, attends a street festival, and so forth. I bet that some of these episodes were not staged, but were real events, shot as they happened. A good example of this is the bit with the Chaplin-like mime in the park, who may not have even known he was appearing in a professional video; he probably thought he was just in someone's home movie. And I bet that was a real night in a real discotheque too. Oh the lucky people who were there that night!

Turns out that Giulia wasn't invited to travel with her classmates because her jealous gay dance instructor Gustavo is having an affair with her sex-show partner Eric. She gets to Rome anyway. I imagine that the Vatican hierarchy blew their collective fuse when they found out what that cameraman used his footage for. But hey, what I love about the Italians is that they're not Catholic.

WARNING: Don't watch this just before bedtime. If you do (as I did), it will seriously mess with your dreams. And don't be fooled by the seemingly simplistic plot. This is as moody and as atmospheric as a movie can get. The wildly expressionistic editing alone would be enough to get under your skin. But on top of that is the music, composed by director Roy Stuart, which is genuinely haunting, and which is sung to perfection by Anna Biella (Giulia) and Alessandro Corsini (Gustavo).

In French and Italian with Italian subtitles. This is the only video I've ever seen that looks more effective and compelling and moody than film. So much for that elusive "film look." Jesus was a vegetarian? Aggressive Hawaiians? Planned animal?OH GOD I LOVE THIS MOVIE!"

Being a fan of the works of Tinto Brass the day would eventually come when I had to see "Giulia". I have read about this movie before, but against my will "Giulia" was the last one from 12 short movies from "Corti circuiti erotici" series (produced by T.Brass) that I happened to see. I started comparing "Giulia" with them all while watching, but somewhere on 20+ minute I realized that this movie stands alone. It is something more than "one of the 12". I was silent, I was in shock, I was amazed. "Oh, how beautiful this movie is! How lovely and again beautiful!". After that night "Giulia" was dominating in my thoughts for several days, and I decided to watch it again to see what does this movie want from me.

Strange thing happened then.... The middle of the movie (when I was "captured" for the previous time) and the second half passed without that emotional uplift I experienced for the first time. But this time I was noticing interesting camera work here and there! Some reviews say that camera work is.… well…. not that good. Maybe, I'm not a professional. But I liked it. Emotional aspect worked again (from the different angle though). Did I face another side of the experience of watching "Giulia"? How many layers does this movie have? What should come next? I am excited again and will watch it again and again.

Another fact, I believe, worth to be mentioned here to make for the movie. French portions of movie (most of it, in fact) are almost locked for my understanding, so I only got the idea of the action from movie itself and from all those reviews posted here and there. Nevertheless, I don't feel uncomfortable when watching, and the actors' play support my perception very well. So, am I speaking about feelings and emotions here again? Soundtrack, although with annoying stops in musical parts here and there, supports the movie in the best way. You're floating down the stream of movie when get in harmony with sounds – not only music, but voices.

Understanding this movie may be difficult, of course. Just like understanding women. Maybe one should not force himself or herself to understand it, but rather try to feel? And give another try later and see what comes then?

This will be a weird review. The movie we are discussing is not too many words worth but the one that came in the same bundle with it certainly is. To begin with, Giulia is a missed opportunity; a waste of great possibilities. Besides, Anna Biella seem to have shot herself in the foot taking part in this mess since her acting credits didn't improve very much after that, and that is a real pity. She is gorgeous to look at and seem to be a very talented actress. In addition to that, she's a real trooper accepting to participate in this short. All that opened a world of possibilities for a minimally talented director to make a hell of an erotic movie. Not so. In this case the movie is not only bad, it's incompetent, and that's worse than bad. The camera work and the editing are so abysmal that it's distracting. The sound stops arbitrarily in the middle of the scenes and the camera turns away suddenly as if we were looking at the unedited dailies. Not that there is too much to follow of the non-existent plot but at least they could have shown us what happens. I am a fierce advocate of crossover experiments with mainstream movies showing explicit sex, but the minimum requirement for that is that the experiment wouldn't be an embarrassment for any porn producer, as is the case here. A true waste.

But the blow came later. Together with Giulia there was a short film called "Sono Come Tu Mi Vuoi". "I am like you want me". My main curiosity was for Giulia and I begun to see the next thing with some skeptic disinterest. Little I knew. My greatest surprise was the performer. After a few sentences, I kind of notice that we were here not only dealing with a professional actress but an awesome one. I started to try to explain myself what was going on. Was the director a genius capable to stage the scene and write the text so good that anyone would look good in it? Probably, and this woman wouldn't be able to play anything else other that what was specially tailored for her… Was she lip synced by a great professional actress that gave her the powerful tones with which she was carrying a 25 minutes monologue with all of us glued to the screen? Sure, that must be. I tried to imagine what her real voice was and what kind of performance she would give without all that help. But I couldn't stay too long in those digressions because the lady brought me back again and again with her magic erotic spell. Well, I was dead wrong. The lady's name is Fiorella Rubino and she's a stage actress that has made her way from Richard III to Otello and tried this erotic experiment at the beginning of her career.

There was some controversy around this film. The movie was produced by Tinto Brass, the famous Italian erotic director, and Ms. Rubino, who is pursuing a political career, has vehemently denied to have worked under his direction. She is correct. The movie was directed by Francesco Dominedò and Brass just produced it and said two words in it. It would have been disappointing if she had repudiated her work because it is an impeccable example of a theater improvisation exercise, something that Lee Strassberg would have been proud to see in any of his seminars but, fortunately, it is not the case. The short film is mentioned in the actress website as part of her impressive CV and she seem to be comfortable with it, like it should be.

I honestly don't know where you can find this gem but, please, look for it.

GIULIA, The celebration of the Female

I advise you to buy the director's cut of this great one hour film direct from the director himself since it contains none of the technical faults of the Tinto Brass version. This is an erotic film in the noblest sense of the term. It connects beauty and sensuality with images that are sometimes crude but always poetic. The sex scenes are perfectly integrated into the narrative resulting in a "poetic realism". With Stuart, the sex is real-direct, natural but also exalted, magnified… a gift for the eyes.

ANNA BIELLA's commanding presence illuminates this film with her eyes, her contralto voice, her gestures, and her expressions.. Her acting allies vivaciousness and sweetness, naturalness and sophistication. Through her character, Stuart conveys an anticlerical humanist message. Giulia is an independent young woman who is prepared to offer her body and her spirit against all the religious taboos. The film is a kick in the face to all the up tight puritans that construct moral walls against the natural flow of life. This is exemplified is the final section dealing with the Pope and the devil as well as when she urinates against the Vatican wall. Stuart is the enemy of repressive moral and social routines. There is the drama teacher who thinking only of his own pleasure, is put to the test by Giulia who chooses where and when she wants to have sex with him; she invites him to a live sex show and beckons unsuccessfully for him to join her on stage. Stuart condemns him as he condemns male selfishness, religious fanaticism and all that works against human liberation, particularly when it targets that of the woman-like the the foot fetishist and the aggressor in the park, disruption and aggressiveness are attitudes essentially masculine. Giulia says to the drama teacher, "when one is a man you should seek to understand women". And when one is also an artist, to celebrate them … but for that celebration, like the opera singer in "Capriccio" it's the woman who is at the heart of the creation, before the composer, the writer and the director: three men, three artists that depend on her.

Bokonon, Août 2006

Thanks to Roy Stuart for this film and the wonderful scene with Tina Aumont. Tina is as usual amazing and what she says is very close with her private history. In my "Waiting for Tina" biography I am glad to write about this scene and its particular atmosphere. "Rome unique objet de mon ressentiment", but not only. It was a town of freedom and experiments on the late sixties and the early seventies and some film producers like Tinto Brass proved it. In Giulia, the music goes perfectly with the picture and the four male characters shown in "Giulia" are a good vision of human being : sex addiction, alibi of faith and brain work, taste for lie, lack of social projects. Maybe it would have been interested to see the evolution of "Giulia" in a second time.

Jean Azarel