Movie Review:

Childhood Memories Revisited

"Julia”, directed by Fred Zinnemann, based on "Pentimento", the memoirs of Lillian Hellman.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictues, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer in an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changes his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.' (Pentimento, 1973)

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classical thought and confused by Julia's rage at the elders' futile lives,

Hellman establishes a contrast of innocence and knowledge in Pentimento:

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Julia and I lay in twin beds and she recited odds and ends of poetry every once in a while she would stop and ask me to recite, but I didn't know anything Dante in Italian, Heine in German, and even though I could not understand either language, the sounds were so lovely that I felt a sweet sadness as if much was ahead in the world, much that was going to be fine and fulfilling if I could ever find my way.

In another section, Hellman records a brief conversation between the two adolescents:

cause. This dangerous journey jostles Lilly into a clearer awareness of the painful but just basis for Julia's beliefs. In spite of Lilly's insecure sense of Julia's feeling for their friendship, Lilly learns that her friend has always respected her: Julia named her child after Lilly, and Lilly will become the guardian if future arrangements can be made.

The contrast between innocence and knowledge begins to fade as Lilly receives news of Julia's death in a mysterious note. The final scenes do not show the romantic images of two girls loving; the stark brutality of Julia's mutilated end leaves Lilly very angry, and alone:

I hear that Julia has been criticized for neglecting, i.e., avoiding, the sexual dimension of this friendship. Hellman suggests in Pentimento that it was present in a vague form:

In a few months I will turn 30 and in spite of the changes and various moves, I still have a friendship that began in the third grade with a woman who is now very different from myself. In our early years we had many passionate fights; she was jealous of my physical dexterity and I thought she was too eager to grow up. But through it all, she was my lifeblood. Like many childhood friendships, her power sabotaged my parents' hold and socialized me in ways unintended by them. We still disagree, almost to that exhausted point where one wonders if it's worth the trouble. Yet something always draws us back into the fold: a fragmented dream of a childhood prank, the birth of a child, a death, the passing of a birthday. To allow the present to define completely who we are, without acknowledging the impact of past intimacies, would effectively erase a vital realm of who we are in the present.

Julia tells the story of a memory told by Lillian Hellman of her childhood love, Julia (a fictitious name invented to protect family members still alive). It is an important film because so few seriously explore female relationships and their influence on personal growth and life-long values. In Pentimento Hellman speaks with certainty of Julia's unique importance:

I think I have always known obout my memory: I know when it is to be trusted and when some dream or fantasy entered on the life, and the dream, the need of dream, led to distortion of what happened. And so I knew early that the rampage angers of an only child were distorted nightmares of reality. But I absolutely trust what I remember about Julia.

Lillian Hellman grew up in an upper middle class home and lived for six month periods in either New Orleans or New York City. She skipped school frequently because "This constant need for adjustment in two very different worlds made formal education into a kind of frantic tennis game, sometimes played with children whose strokes had force and brilliance, sometimes with those who could barely hold the racket. Possibly it is the reason I never did well in school or in college, and why I wanted to be left alone to read by myself. I had found, very early, that any other test found me bounding with ease and grace over the fence to fall on my face as I ran towards the next." (An Unfinished Woman,, 1961).

In the film we do not know of Lilly's background. We see her as a child only within the context of Julia's aristocratic class situation, showing the cultural contradictions of decadence and power, coupled with a denial of inequality and indifference to the squalor of the poor. We see Lilly as awkward and hesitant, admiring Julia's certainty and grasp of

page 6/December, 1977/What She Wants

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J: No, you don't understand. People are either teachers or students. You are a student.

L: Am I a good one?

J: When you find out what you want, you will be very good.

Lilly's deference to Julia continues throughout the film, past their childhood, forming the basis for their adult friendship. The difference between them grows more acute and disturbing as Lilly (sensitively played by Jane Fonda) pursues her writing and Julia (whose character is portrayed strongly by Vanessa Redgrave) becomes a political activist willing to stake her life against the increasing number of crimes committed by Fascist thugs in pre-World War II Germany.

We see this development only through Lilly's eyes. What sustains their bond is the depth of childhood experience. Lilly's present continually returns to her memories of Julia's decisiveness. Julia counts on Lilly as an adult because she always admired and trusted Lilly's anger. When Julia asks her to smuggle money into Nazi Germany to free political prisoners, Lilly does so because of their emotional tie rather than any specific commitment to a

photo by Cecile Starr, Filmmakers Newsletter, Nov. 1977

I have had plenty of time to think about the love I had for her, too strong and too complicated to be defined as only the sexual yearnings of one girl for another. And yet certainly that was there. I don't know, I never cared, and it is now an aimless guessing game. It doesn't prove much that we never kissed each other; even when I leaned down in a London funeral parlor to kiss the battered face that had been so hideously put back together, it was not the awful scars that worried me: because I had never kissed her I thought perhaps she would not want it and so I touched the face instead.

Here is the pentimento theme again, which trusts an interpretation of present meaning through the medium of original memories. For the film to develop an explicit sexual aspect of their friendship would exploit the message of pentimento, filtering the past through an uncertain adult notion of what had transpired. This is what is so good, about the film: it distrusts easy categories and judgments, presenting women in all of their complexity and validating the organic quality of our lives.

--Carol Epstein