Julie&Julia: love&food across time in US and Europe

Food, marriage and intertwined lives combine in this latest feel-good factor film from Hollywood screenwriter-producer Nora Ephron, who brought the world When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and Heartburn. It tells the story of Julia Child, food writer and doyenne of TV chefs, whose cookery show was the first to have subtitles of the deaf and hard of hearing, in the America of the 1950/60s/70s through the eyes of a twenty-something newly married girl in New York, Julie. Julia Child wrote the seminal book on French cuisine (Mastering the Art of French Cooking), that revolutionised American attitudes to cooking. A daughter of Californian privilege and wife of an American diplomatic official, Julia Child became the unlikely star of the television age and food writer of enormous distinction. It was said that every College girl moving to New York across the decades of the mid-twentieth century had to have three items in her possession: a couch, a copy of Joseph Heller’s book Catch 22 and a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child.

Based on Child’s autobiography and a book by Julie Powell, the film’s central dynamic takes a twenty-first century newly married girl Julie, played by Amy Adams, living with her journalist husband above a pizza shop in downtown New York. Commuting to an uninspiring government agency job Julie dreams of accomplishments beyond her humdrum existence. She finds it in her twin passions of cooking and writing by resolving to spend a year cooking her way through recipes in Julia Child’s magnus opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking and to blog about the experience.

By using the classic cinematic device of running two stories simultaneously, Julie’s story unfolds in the New York of the 2000s whilst Julia’s autobiography develops in the postwar Paris as she evolves from government service wife to legendary food writer by way of happenstance and accident. Meryl Streep gives one of her best screen performances to date, displaying once again a gift for light comedy as luminous as her dramatic talent. Streep captures the awkward, ungainly, forthright yet well-meaning manner of a very tall woman brilliantly and her well known facility with accent and tone evokes the educated, well-bred voice of her subject precisely. Stanley Tucci plays her affectionate husband Paul with humour and a touch of gentle comic irony which complements his co-star’s large screen persona. The film is as much an analysis of a loving marriage as it is affectionate tribute to a much-loved figure. The theme of relationships between the central characters are contrasted by the pressures of modern living faced by Julie and husband Eric in twenty-first century New York with the diplomatic life of Julia and her husband in postwar Europe.

A recurring theme beloved of Nora Ephron is that of friendship between women – they meet for lunch and dinner to compare notes, parade successes and give bittersweet advice to each other. There is the inevitable tension between Julie and her partner as the cooking obsession takes hold and starts to affect their relationship with crisis ultimately resolved when the project ends with media interest and beginnings of a writing career. This is in counter-point to Julia’s life – she forged a career almost by accident and in spite of herself from a desire to be occupied when women of her age and class were expected to marry well and be decorative, whereas the young protagonist Julie has a conscious drive to succeed with an expectation of that possibility in an age of opportunity for women that would have been almost unknown to Julia’s contemporaries. These parallels, however, should not be overplayed. If the film is an examination of modern sensibilities: relationships, work, career, self-fulfillment, ambition and the role of the internet in life and living; it is also a reminder of the universal theme of the quest for the good relationship and what the songwriter called the ‘fight for love and glory’. Could it be that it really is the same old story after all?