In cinemas this Wednesday, March 25, Cato Kusters’ first feature-length film tells the original and engaged project of a lesbian couple to which death prematurely put an end.
It’s a beautiful and tragic lesbian love story that the Belgian filmmaker Cato Kusters tells in Julian, released in cinemas this Wednesday, March 25. Fleur Pierets and Julian P. Boom have always been creative personalities. One is both a writer and art critic, the other is ocean-floor cartographer and performance artist. In 2017, shortly after their wedding in New York, the two women decide to embark on what they call “the Project 22.” The objective of this challenge is at once personal, symbolic and engaged: to exchange the ring in the twenty-two countries of the world where same-sex unions are then legalized.
But after they said yes in Paris, the fourth stage of their world-wide wandering, Julian nearly fainted on the forecourt of the City Hall. Medical tests reveal several tumors around her brain and heart. Her health deteriorates at a furious pace, the couple’s project is abruptly halted. Julian dies in January 2018.
A Romantic Epic
Today, Fleur continues to recount this adventure to its tragic end. It was during a radio appearance by the widow that the Belgian director Cato Kusters discovered her. Fascinated, she became passionately drawn to this extraordinary love story. Already the author of several short films, the 28-year-old filmmaker seized the project to turn the screenplay of Julian into her first feature-length film, which oscillates between biographical narrative and romantic drama. She opts for a disjointed narration, weaving back and forth between Fleur and Julian’s small victories along their journey, and a present marked by mourning and the need to honor the memory of the deceased.
On screen, Nina Meurisse and Laurence Roothooft form a lovely cinematic couple. More than a homage, the film has the sweep of a romantic epic, without the mawkishness that we’re fed too often. The direction, restrained, foregrounds the spectrum of feelings—sometimes conflicting—that traverse the two protagonists: passion, grief, euphoria, frustration… What remains is the love.
