‘Goodbye Julia Review: An Operatic Drama Nimbly Tackles The Story Of A Fractured Sudan
The threat of violence looms in every interaction in Mohamed Kordofani's Sudanese drama Farewell Julia . Open Khartoum is filled with the sounds of gunfire, the screams of corpses being burned alive, and the sounds of makeshift houses being taken over. So it's a shock, but not necessarily a surprise, when an absent-minded woman hits a child with her car. The moment comes quickly: the child falls to the ground; The father finds the body and cries. The woman steps back. The chase begins.
What does a father do when he sees his son suffering? He gets on the motorcycle and follows the frightened woman. I called to him to stop, wait and explain. She cannot leave an injured child in the street. But this is Sudan in 2005, another civil war is over and secession is just around the corner. The woman is dark-haired and from the north. The man is black and from the south. They coexist in Khartoum, but the city does not see both northerners and southerners alike. Racism reigns in the country: this scene with a man on a bicycle and a woman madly calling her husband is not for him.
Goodbye Julia
Fundamentally sonorous and accessible.
So it may again come as a shock, but not necessarily a surprise, when the wife finally returns home and her husband shoots his father out of fear of the southerners, whom he calls savages and slaves. According to witnesses, the dead man is Santino (Paolino Victor Paul), hostile and dangerous. Mona (played by Eman Youssef, surprisingly serious) doesn't know how to tell her husband Akram (Nizar Jumaa) what led to the case. Feeling guilty, she decides to find Santino's family and make amends anonymously.
Goodbye Julia weaves the tense politics of a divided nation into an elaborate tapestry of silent domestic drama. The Sudanese film is the first of its kind in the official Cannes selection, but it has a rich cinematic tradition. The history of Sudanese cinema includes the work of African film pioneer Jadallah Jabara and more recent projects such as Suhaib Gambari's Tree Talk and Amjad Abu Alala 's You Die at Twenty . Kordofani's film emerges from the contemporary landscape as a feature film that seeks to challenge the exclusion and discrimination that South Sudanese people face.
Farewell, Julia. Mona's fissures intertwine with each other through a thin web of Mona's conflicting feelings and actions that oscillate between misguided and good intentions. Kordofani, with the help of cinematographer Pierre de Villiers, connects the audience with Mona through extensive use of close-ups. Her face becomes a canvas, revealing the depth of her remorse and determination. Youssef, a Sudanese theater actress and singer, handles her character's emotional demands with confidence. Guilt weighs heavily on Mona, who long ago decided that the only way to escape the pressure was to lie.
Mona is looking for Santino's widow, Julia (Siran Riak in her lead role), while the latter is selling things on the street. Julia does not recognize Mona and is not very interested in strange female habits. Mona insists on buying expensive breakfast cereal and Julia asks if she knows anything good before selling it. The contracts essentially define the relationship between the two women: Julia takes a job as Mona's housekeeper; Mona offered to pay Julia's son Danny (played first by Louis Daniel Ding, then by Stefanos James Peter) to go to school. Mona does not tell Akram about her plans, although he looks at her warily.
Julia does not stop looking for Santino. He turned himself in to the police, who ignored his requests and asked his friends if they had seen him. He fears her death and then becomes angry at the thought of leaving him. Julia is less attracted to Kordofani than Mona. While the director has a clear desire to humanize his character, it can come across as harsh at times. A rare moment of vulnerability — when a grieving Julia opens the coffin at a public funeral in hopes of being reunited with her husband — teases us with the possibility that the character is more than Mona's puppet.
Goodbye Julia slowly moves from scene to scene, except for a twist that takes the story from 2005 to 2010. Kordofani gives viewers a sense of intense chaos and quiet silence in the lives of Mona and Julia. They become friends and also honor Danny as a carpenter's apprentice. You can see how Kordofani works with his political ideas on the root causes of division through these family relationships. Mona and Akram, whose marriage has already been strained, argue heatedly about their differences. Mona accuses Akram of racism, and Akram replies that his wife is no better than him: after all, Julia is his maid, not his girlfriend.
Inspired by childhood in Kordofan, these conversations focus on racism, religious tension, xenophobia, and what it means to build a national identity in the face of it all. In a recent interview, the director mentioned his childhood, specifically as a servant in his home with people from the southern region of Sudan, as an inspiration. This can be seen in the way he handles the changing relationship between Mona, Julia, Danny and Akram, which sometimes seems unrealistically romantic.
Kordofani manages to break that perfect façade towards the end of the film, which doesn't quite go as planned. Thankfully, there is no forced forgiveness or avoidance of anger, especially when Mona's lies begin to be exposed. But what's happening makes you wish we had more time with Julia and Danny; Moments of peace between mother and son can heighten our sense of them as individuals with their own desires and motives. There is an attempt to give Julia's character more dimension with a love interest (played by Ger Dwan), but this development seems rushed compared to Akram and Mona's talk of their own marriages.
However, Goodbye Julia will bring Sudanese issues to life for viewers. Kordofani's meticulous direction balances several film modes: thriller-tinged drama and its own political message. With its classic and approachable style, Goodbye Julia will get a lot of cinematic support in Sudan, a country full of stories that tell about its past and present.
As I watched the film, my thoughts kept returning to Julia, thinking about her childhood in Khartoum and her feelings for home. Kordofani alludes to some of these questions in Goodbye Julia , but their answers could be the subject of their own movie.
