Saturday March 20, 2010

Julie & Julia

USA 2009         123 minutes    12A certificate

Directed by Nora Ephron, starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci
Nora Ephron’s delightful film tells the parallel stories of two real-life characters who never met: Julie Powell, contemporary blogger/novelist and Julia Child, America’s answer to Elizabeth David, author of a series of now classic cooking texts, and the US’s earliest incarnation of the TV celebrity chef.

In 2002 New York City, Julie is frustrated and unfulfilled in a thankless administrative job. In 1946 Paris, Julia Child is equally frustrated with the life of a diplomatic spouse - millinery and bridge are not enough for a keen intellect and considerable capacity for boredom. Both women turn to food for intellectual and spiritual enrichment. Child - patrician, eccentric, very tall, female and with little French - bulldozes her way into the Cordon Bleu cookery academy, becomes an accomplished chef and teacher, and takes up a 15 year challenge of translating the mysteries of French cuisine for an English speaking audience. Powell, meanwhile, decides to set herself an apparently insurmountable culinary task, and write a blog about the experience: she chooses to cook her way through Child’s tome Mastering the Art of French Cookery, taking on 524 recipes in 365 days.

The minutiae of two lives placed side by side make for a satisfying exploration of massive social change, not least the lives of middle class females or the business of writing and communicating. Ephron’s most noted earlier movies – Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally – share this film’s interest in lives that run in parallel but with intrinsic connections with each other. But if those films were preoccupied with romantic notions of destiny, fate and finding “The One”, Julie and Julia is far more pragmatic about the business of staying together – crucial to the success of both women is the success of a marriage and the support of a loving husband.

This is a film that celebrates not the thrill of falling in love but the satisfactions of prolonged partnerships, the sharing of difficulty and disappointment, mutual support and encouragement. It celebrates the routine and the domestic and the day to day business of sharing food and a home and as such it is far more heart warming and resonant than the earlier films that seem saccharine in comparison. And the cast are wonderful, particularly Tucci and Streep as the unlikely but devoted Childs. Witty and civilised, this is a film for anyone who likes to feed or to be fed.

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