Juliette & Julia

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I haven't seen "Julie & Julia" yet - the new movie about chef Julia Child and Julie Powell - and I think I need to, but I was thinking about two other movie women recently: Juliette & Julia.

Don and I watched "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" a couple weeks past, and we were sure the daughter of Cate Blanchett's character was played by Juliette Binoche, which just shows that even an earnest fan like me can mix these two up. It was in fact Julia Ormond who played Caroline in Benjamin Button, of course. Well, can you blame me for mixing up two brunettes with chiseled cheekbones, dark eyes and names that sound similar? I mean, they were even born less than a year apart - Juliette in 1964 (March 9) and Julia in 1965 (January 4).

Two of my all time favorite characters in the movies are Binoche's Hana in "The English Patient" and Ormond's "Sabrina" in the revisit of Audrey Hepburn's 1954 role. These two movies, like the actresses, are also one year apart - 1996 and 1995 respectively. One reason they are favorites is because I'm a Francophile, and Sabrina goes to Paris to study photography, while Binoche is just, well, French. If I were an adolescent again mimicking actresses, these are the ones I'd want to see looking back in the mirror with their eager and eternal eyes. (I didn't mean to alliterate that.)

Both films are about women growing up. Sabrina is the chauffeur's daughter in love with the prodigal prince of the estate, David. She is viewed with class prejudice by David's older and steadier brother Linus, the way Mr. Darcy and his rich aunt viewed Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. The pain she suffers in this romantic comedy starts in unrequited love as a teenager and develops into downright rejection for her station in life even after becoming a respectable career woman. In "The English Patient," Hana is an army nurse surrounded by death and injury, including her dearest loved ones. The dying burn patient she sequesters in an abandoned convent is upper class like David and Linus, a Hungarian Count. She is the listener to the patient's stories as he flashes back to before his accident. He educates her:

PATIENT: Heroditus is the father of history, did you know that?
HANA: I don't know anything. (She says this as she is peeling a plum to feed him, like a mother bird.)

It is an old fashioned theme - the feminine innocent being taught and shaped by wiser, more powerful male players, either in the male stratosphere of high finance in "Sabrina" or in the bloody fields of men's war in "The English Patient." Sabrina and Hana are written and played by Ormond and Binoche as modern women who make their own choices within the limits and flaws of a world that has been conceived for millennia by men. And more than that, just like Florence Nightingale who scrapped a life of wealth and ease to nurse the poor and helpless, there is a sense that these two want to transform the damage they find with their simple touch.

When Linus asks Sabrina where she got her name, she tells him her father found it in a poem:

"Sabrina fair, listen where thou art sitting under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, in twisted braids of lilies knitting the loose train of thy amber-dropping hair."

Linus asks, "So, your little poem...what does it mean?"

Sabrina replies, "It's the story of a watersprite who saves a virgin from a fate worse than death."

Linus: "And Sabrina is the virgin?"

Sabrina: "Sabrina is the saviour."
















Here is a music video of Sting singing "Moonlight" from "Sabrina."