A couple of weeks back I reporter that Erick Zonca’s Julia would be headed to Venice. Not true. Now I'm thinking that this along with Michael Haneke's Funny Games are probably 2 Euro-selections for the upcoming TIFF film festival.
Filmed in English in California and Mexico, and inspired by John Cassavetes' 1980 film, Gloria – Julia, a 40 year-old seductress (played by the excellent Tilda Swinton), finds it increasingly difficult to hide her alcoholism and ends up out of her depth. At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she encounters a young Mexican woman who can no longer see her son so Julia accepts to kidnap the eight year-old boy. Despite the sudden disappearance of the young woman, Julia succeeds in the kidnapping but gets caught up in an infernal spiral and frantically escapes to Mexico, with the child’s grandfather hot on their heels.
Funny Games is Haneke's English-language remake of his 1997 film, but the setting will now be the Hamptons. The film is about a middle-class family on holiday who are terrorised by two young men.
