This potent modern tale is told in stark fashion, where familiar everyday interiors—classrooms, dorm rooms, airports—seem strange and "other," often dimly lit, with lots of windows showing no life beyond, almost like the interiors have no real substance. It's hard to imagine people just hanging out and talking and having fun in any of the interiors in the film. The sound is extremely controlled, with silence dominating. Tom Comerford's cinematography highlights the strangeness of these spaces, the barely inhabited college campus, the generic quality of Ellen's house, the shadowy expanse of Rose's dorm room. This is not a realistic world. Stephen McKeon’s very dramatic score, complete with creepy-sounding sopranos, is used sparingly, and to great effect.
"Rose Plays Julie" is a simple tale, really, but the emotions are enormous and fraught, calling up comparisons to Aeschylus' The Oresteia, or, Sophocles' Electra, where Electra, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra, bound together by family ties, march towards horrible climaxes of action and counter-reaction, following the demands of fate and destiny. When a deer falls into the archaeological dig and has to be "put down," Peter's anguish is the most intriguing thing about him, connecting him to the biological daughter he doesn't even know he has, whom we saw in an early scene shedding a tear during a euthanasia procedure in her veterinary program. Father and daughter are already magnets.
"Rose Plays Julie" is a sparsely populated film, giving the impression that Rose, Ellen, and Peter are charging towards one another on a vast and empty battlefield. Skelly is both beautifully expressive—her eyes and voice drawing you in—and very hard to read. Something is frozen in Rose, it's like she's screaming for help from the bottom of a well. (There is one moment where she screams something and the sound drops out. You only hear later what it was she said.) Why she didn't just write Ellen an email requesting they meet for coffee is one of Rose's mysteries: Rose is led deeper and deeper into the fairy tale forest (the first conversation with her mother takes place at the edge of a forest), as she is pulled towards Peter by an irresistible force. Ellen feels that force, too. Brady is excellent as Ellen, a woman who turned her back on her past, shoving it into a closet where she never had to look at it again. When Rose shows up in her life unannounced, Brady's face flickers with a potent mix of uneasiness and terror, but there's calmness there too. Part of her, a secret part, always knew this day would come.
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