Why the Photos???
I get lots of different elements form this film but how they connect together into a whole story to say something interesting just goes right over my head.
I didn't read the blurb for the film, so started watching it without really having any idea of where it was going to go.
Julies attitude towards Paula is more maternal that lesbian, this could be because she never had kids and regretted her decision to seperate from her husband and not have them. Paulas attitude is clearly flirtatious although i don;t think she is gay. She just likes to control people in a sexual manner... this is why as part of her lie to julie, she drops in that her and the friend 'slept together between boyfriends.'
I feel like its all about Paulas writing. She says she write non fiction- short stories about what she experiences. I think its clear that instead of writing mundane everyday stories about her like she takes on a character, pulls strings, presses buttons, makes a situation happen.
At first her story is about a young girl who meets a business woman in passing in a hotel airport... the business woman pays for the girls room, they get to know each other, flirt in the pool, and have a love affair. The story never gets this far though- Paula has to change her plot halfway through, because the guy shows up and interupts the scandalous affair thread. She then makes certain plays, sets it all up, and then let julie call the shots. I don't think the plan was to pretend to be a girl pretending that her friend was raped when it was really her, i think that when julie announces that 'she knows' paula is probably scared for a split second that julie is about to say 'this guy did nothing and ive done nothing, what the hell are YOU doing?' but when julie says 'i know it was you,' paula just takes the story in that direction.
She makes her life more exciting, but she does so by manipulating other people into doing it for her... She sets things up and then lets things escalate and unfold however they will, in this sense her writing is like a controlled kind of non fiction. Paula believes her life is exciting enough to write stories about, but the situations she gets herself into aren't truly real - she lives in a fantasy world. When Julie announces that she knows, and paula says 'you dont know, what do you know
It wasnt too good a movie but theres plenty to discuss. In the end, both Julie and they guy end up feeling like they were forced to go through something for nothing, and theyre both ashamed. Im not going to say they feel like theyve been raped, as i very much doubt thats how bad they feel, but i think that may be what the ending was trying to say.
The one thing i don't get is...
why the photographs?!
Are they just a prop? Are they to show that Julie was a character in the non fictional fiction rather than outside of it like Paula? Like... they werent in it together, Paula was in it alone and BOTH the guy and julie were the victims?
Hmmmm. Sorry this post is so long.