JULIE KEEPS QUIET - Mark Reviews Movies

Julie Keeps Quiet, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck) is a teenager and a high-schooler, but that says nothing about her, except that she's young and has her whole life ahead of her. What matters to Julie above everything else is tennis. She attends an exclusive academy for aspiring professionals in the sport, which she attends on scholarship because her family doesn't have the money to pay but she is too talented not to be there. The other defining characteristic of the central character of Julie Keeps Quiet is, well, right there in the title.

The film, co-written and directed by Leonardo Van Dijl (his feature debut), is about a scandal at the tennis school. It begins with the unexpected absence of the academy's most prominent coach, becomes whispers of why a recent graduate of the school died by suicide, turns into some wondering if the coach's suspension and the young woman's death are somehow connected, and results in an internal investigation by those in charge of the academy. Everyone wants Julie to talk about this man, who was her coach right up until he didn't show up for practice that day, but for whatever reason, she doesn't say anything.

What are we—watching this teenage girl in moments of long silences, regular contemplation, and still going through her daily routines of attending classes before hours of training for an upcoming evaluation of her tennis skills—supposed to take from this act of observation? Van Dijl also makes that as clear as the title, perhaps. We are merely meant to observe, because there is a whole world of doubt and insecurity and pain within Julie, even if she tries not to show it and especially if she won't talk about it. It is right there for anyone to see, if they care enough to consider how excruciating it must be to hold on to a secret like the one Julie is keeping.

The screenplay by Van Dijl and Ruth Becquart, who also plays Julie's mother, tells us everything we need to know about what has happened to Julie or, at least, what she knows about the behavior of her coach from first-hand experience. It is not a story about awful details, because it does genuinely respect that its protagonist does not want to speak about them.

The little information we do receive here, by way of a key conversation between Julie and the coach, is enough to condemn him. Indeed, that he does want to talk to her, even in the midst of an investigation into his behavior, is likely enough to know what he has done. Beyond that, the fact that Julie does spend the first part of this story desperate to talk to her former coach, holding her cellphone as she sleeps so that she doesn't miss one of his calls, gives a sense of just how much of a psychological hold he has on her.

This film, then, tells its story in quiet, in stillness, and in between the lines of the little we do see and learn. It's a patient and subtle act of storytelling.

Most of that story simply does follow Julie, played with compelling interiority in Van den Broeck's debut performance, over the course of her regular routines. We see her at practice first, of course, where she's the star of the academy but kept at something of a distance by her peers. How much of that is their opinion of her, as someone outside of their socioeconomic standing and who's receiving these lessons at no cost, and how much of that is how the coach has, in some way, separated her from the pack?

At school, she does the work and nothing more, leaving classes early when she has physical therapy to check on her recovery from a recent injury. Her grades are slipping a bit, and when her mother tries to explain that some of it must be because of the trouble that has arisen at the tennis academy, Julie is quick to stop her mother before she can even finish the thought.

Despite the scandal and the uncertainty around both the former student's suicide and the coach's relationship with that tennis player, everyone else tries to keep things going and move forward. A new coach, named Backie (Pierre Gervais), takes over lessons. Students are scheduled to speak with the academy's administration to answer questions about what they may have seen from the former coach. Julie still has a test of sorts to prepare for, in which a semi-pro organization sponsors the three best players in the country (Belgium, by the way), and because she wants to succeed and maybe for other reasons, she does answer her old coach's calls and even meets with him—in eerily secret settings.

That coach, by the way, does appear on screen, too, played by Laurent Caron, although he could be anyone for the way Van Dijl keeps the character's face obscured in shadow or by the camera angle. He's not the point. His actions don't matter, except in how they affected Julie, and his presence is irrelevant, except to show that Julie has come to depend on this man in some way.

To be sure, the film is unsettling, because it is so connected to Julie and the obvious conflict within her. Julie Keeps Quiet, though, is as subtly optimistic as it is insightful, because Van Dijl forces us to pay attention to the little details. They may include why Julie is silent and the implications of the relationship with her coach. They're also, though, in the little but significant ways she does move forward here at school and in her relationships and in the sport, despite what has happened and because she does know the truth, even if she won't say it.

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