Julia and Julia is a 1987

1987 in film

-Events:*January 31 - The Cure for Insomnia premieres at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois, to officially become the world's longest film according to Guinness World Records....

 Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

 directed by Peter Del Monte

Peter Del Monte

Peter Del Monte is an Italian film director and screenwriter. He has directed 15 films since 1969. His 1982 film Invitation au voyage won the prize for the Best Artistic Contribution at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.-Filmography:...

. The screenplay

Screenplay

A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...

 by Silvia Napolitano, Sandro Petraglia

Sandro Petraglia

Sandro Petraglia is an author and screenwriter. He has over 40 writing credits to his name, most famously the 400-minute epic La Meglio Gioventù.-Filmography :*Mino...

, Joseph Minion

Joseph Minion

Joseph Minion is an American film director and screenwriter, best known for Martin Scorsese's After Hours .Born in New Jersey in 1957, Minion briefly attended NYU Film School before finishing his studies at Columbia University, then renowned for its screenwriting program...

, and Del Monte is based on a story by Napolitano.

Plot synopsis

Grief-stricken Julia, an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 widow

Widow

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died, while a widower is a man whose spouse has died. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood or occasionally viduity. The adjective form is widowed...

ed on her wedding day when her husband Paolo is killed in a car accident, lives and works in Trieste

Trieste

Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...

. Six years later she returns to her apartment to discover a strange woman living there. Across the street, in the elegant home she and Paolo had purchased and which she never sold, she finds him and their young son, treating her as if they have been together all along. Paolo is a workaholic dedicated to his career as a ship designer and a restless Julia has taken British

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 photographer Daniel as a lover.

Bewildered but happy to have her husband back, Julia tries to mend her marriage, but suddenly finds herself once again widowed and alone. As she slips back and forth between two different worlds, she finds it increasingly difficult to determine which is reality and which is fantasy and begins to question her sanity.

Production notes

The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival

Venice Film Festival

The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

 in 1987. A dubbed

Dubbing (filmmaking)

Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...

 version was given limited release in the United States in January of the following year by Cinecom Pictures and earned $901,364 . It was released in foreign markets as Giulia e Giulia.

This was the first feature shot using the Sony HDVS

Sony HDVS

Sony HDVS was a range of high-definition video equipment developed in the 1980s to support an early analog high-definition television system thought to be the broadcast television systems that would be in use today...

 wideband analog High-definition video

High-definition video

High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...

 technique and then transferred to 35 mm film

35 mm film

35 mm film is the film gauge most commonly used for chemical still photography and motion pictures. The name of the gauge refers to the width of the photographic film, which consists of strips 35 millimeters in width...

 .

Principal cast

• Kathleen Turner
  Kathleen Turner
  Mary Kathleen Turner is an American actress. She came to fame during the 1980s, after roles in the Hollywood films Body Heat, Peggy Sue Got Married, Romancing the Stone, The War of the Roses, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Prizzi's Honor...
  
   ..... Julia
• Gabriel Byrne
  Gabriel Byrne
  Gabriel James Byrne is an Irish actor, film director, film producer, writer, cultural ambassador and audiobook narrator. His acting career began in the Focus Theatre before he joined Londo's Royal Court Theatre in 1979. Byrne's screen debut came in the Irish soap opera The Riordans and the...
  
   ..... Paolo
• Sting ..... Daniel Osler
• Gabriele Ferzetti
  Gabriele Ferzetti
  Gabriele Ferzetti is an Italian actor. He has more than 160 credits to his name across film, television and stage. His career was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s....
  
   ..... Paolo's Father
• Angela Goodwin ..... Paolo's Mother

Principal production credits

• Executive Producers
  Film producer
  A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...
  
   ..... Francesco Pinto, Gaetano Stucchi
• Original Music
  Film score
  A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
  
   ..... Maurice Jarre
  Maurice Jarre
  Maurice-Alexis Jarre was a French composer and conductor.Although he composed several concert works, he is best known for his film scores, and is particularly known for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia...
  
  
• Cinematography
  Cinematography
  Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
  
   ..... Giuseppe Rotunno
  Giuseppe Rotunno
  Giuseppe Rotunno, A.S.C., A.I.C. is an Italian cinematographer. Sometimes credited as Peppino Rotunno, he was director of photography on eight films by Federico Fellini...
  
  
• Production Design
  Production designer
  In film and television, a production designer is the person responsible for the overall look of a filmed event such as films, TV programs, music videos or adverts. Production designers have one of the key creative roles in the creation of motion pictures and television. Working directly with the...
  
   ..... Mario Garbuglia
  Mario Garbuglia
  Mario Garbuglia was an Italian set designer. He won the David di Donatello, the Nastro d'Argento and a BAFTA.- Life :...
  
  
• Costume Design
  Costume design
  Costume design is the fabrication of apparel for the overall appearance of a character or performer. This usually involves researching, designing and building the actual items from conception. Costumes may be for a theater or cinema performance but may not be limited to such...
  
   ..... Nino Cerruti
  Nino Cerruti
  Nino Cerruti is an Italian businessman and stylist, among the most famous in the world.He founded his own haute couture house Cerruti in 1967 in Paris...
  
  , Danda Ortona
• Film Editing ..... Michael Chandler

Critical reception

In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby

Vincent Canby

Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...

 called the film "a not-very-spooky melodrama" and added, "[it] is minor movie making, but it does prove two things: that Kathleen Turner has become the kind of star who can carry even third-rate fiction without losing her beautiful, voluptuous cool, and that high-definition tape (on which this was initially shot) can be transferred to film and look as good as anything shot on film to start with."

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 of the Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

observed, "The construction of the story is ingenious and perverse and has a kind of inner logic of its own . . . This is the kind of movie that proves unbearably frustrating to some people, who demand explanations and resent obscurity. I have seen so many movies recently in which absolutely everything could be predicted that I found Julia and Julia perversely entertaining."

In the Washington Post, Rita Kempley described the film as "peculiar" and added, "The unstable Julia must have seemed like a juicy opportunity for Turner, who likes to test herself with diverse roles."