Julia & Julie Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams. Director: Nora Ephron Running time: 123 minutes Genre comedy This film traces two parallel stories of women finding purpose in the drag of their lives. Julia Child is the soon to be author of Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, played by Meryll Streep. Child is an unashamedly loud and extremely tall character contrasting with the petite and proper women of Paris in the 1950’s makes for some hilarious comedy. Wife of an American diplomat newly relocated to Paris she is searching for a pastime and tries selling hats and learning bridge before discovering her real passion in cooking.
She broke the conventions and enrolled as the first female into a curdon bleu cooking college. She throws herself into her new hobby not holding back even at practising slicing a mountain of onions. The film is held together by this stunning performance by Streep with her larger than life antics and bubbly and ever so British accent. On the other hand in New York, we meet Julie Powell, having just moved to a house where the trains roll by every half hour. She works in a help call centre for those effected by 9/11.
After an awful lunch with her friends who have scaled the lofty height of the corporate ladder, and seemingly grown attached to their mobiles, she decides she needs an escape. She takes on the momentous challenge of cooking her way through Childs book, Mastering The Art OF French Cooking, and write a blog about it. We follow her story through its trials and triumphs feeling each with the intensity that this performance by Amy Adams brings. The main characters never actually meet on stage yet Child becomes Powell’s imaginary friend and counsellor and they are bound together on an exploration of their love for food.
