Who The Hell Is Juliette? (1998)

Yuliet Ortega is a 16-year-old Cubana who lives in a rough, rundown neighborhood in Havana; Fabiola Quiroz is a successful Mexican model who divides her time between music videos in Latin America and fashion shoots in New York City. They have three things in common: startling green eyes, an obsession with their absent fathers, and the passionate interest of filmmaker Carlos Marcovich, who has intertwined their stories into a lively, evocative mix of fact and fiction titled Who the Hell Is Juliette?

Marcovich plays Ortega's great, bursting energy and barking laugh against Quiroz's introspection and melancholy. If he's making a point about differences in national characters, it's nicely undersold and flows without a trace of editorializing. Their difference is like that of the mountains and the sea, of stony self-sufficiency and bubbling openness.

Both women have significant ties to North America. Quiroz's mother traces her daughter's green eyes to her long-vanished father, a Canadian archeologist on a dig in Michoacan. Ortega's father, who abandoned his family during the Mariela boatlift, turns out to be an electrician living in New Jersey. This is a fine example of what happens when a filmmaker follows the logic of a subject that intrigues him rather than conforms to a preset script. Who the Hell Is Juliet? seems to be discovering itself as it goes along, just like its two appealing heroines. --Dave Kehr Amazon.com

Labeling Yuliet a prostitute is misleading

This is a beautiful movie but I think the above reviewers are incorrect in labeling Yuliet a prostitute. Many young Cuban girls, left with no way to earn a living, go to the beaches and engage in sex with European tourists for food and money. It is an occasional thing and not a regular and continual practice.

This film showed the reality of Cuban life, which is brutal, hand to mouth and desperate. The interpersonal relationships are very bad, grandparent to grandchild and brother to sister or husband and wife. Lots of domestic abuse, rampant infidelity, sexism, rape and child abuse. The Cuban culture is very mixed up and tragic all around. The lives of Cuban women are terrible indeed. May 16, 2007

Unique, Colorful and Completely Different.

Who The Hell Is Juliette? is the cinematic equivalent of a patchwork quilt, overlapping memories, characters and storylines to create something unique and colorful. The story of a young Cuban jintera who was discovered by a Mexican video producer. Juliette's claim to fame is her resemblance to the Mexican model/actress and her ability to dance. This alleged documentary juxtaposes the stories of the lives of Juliette and the model. It explores their relationships with their families and friends and what has happened to Juliette after the music video wrapped.
Unlike Hollywood films that tend to depict vulnerable hookers with hearts of gold, this film offers a heroine who is as tough as nails. Her survival skills were aquired early. Her father deserted the family. Her mother immolated herself, lingered a while then died of a heart attack leaving Juliette with an abusive grandmother. At 16, she is streetwise beyond her years, flippant and self possessed.

She embraces her status as an outsider, mocking church, friends, family and even the camera. Vulgar and more than a little rough around the edges, Juliette still manages to come across as charming and entertaning. Like a car wreck that you can't turn away from Juliette's life is riveting. You get a sense that this girl could conquer the world, or at least be the Cuban equivalent of Madonna or Debbie Harry if she had the chance.
This film reminds me of This Is Spinal Tap. Of course, the director's preferred genre is music video so the pretensiousness and the strategy of baiting minor characters into clever lines works out well in the end. December 23, 2005

The best film ever made anywhere anytime by anybody any place.

A friend of mine sent me this film and it has haunted
me forever since. Two two women with absent fathers, the 16-year-old exuberant Cuban girl Yuliet Ortega and the melancholy Mexican model Fabiola Quiroga are intertwined by director Carlo Marcovich in a film masterpiece which erases the boundaries between fiction and documentary like Tom Wolfe infused new jounalism with the technique and spirit of the novel. Marcovich has a perfect sense of pitch, balancing humor and tragedy, elegant lithe cinemaphotography and superb music and sound, a playful sense of dreamy wonder and the absolutely real feel of the street and barrio. Just the way Marcovich moves his camera around Havana and the barrio is a poem.

While this is a work of startling absolute originality, it evokes memories of the greatest filmmakers: The two women of Persona, the awareness of the fourth wall and the self aware politics of the camera of Jean Luc Godard, the inner dream world of Fellini and Bunuel.

Fantastic. Seen it a million times. Ortega - so alive - makes me wonder where she is. August 26, 2005

Like no film I have ever seen....

I was introduced to this film by a friend of mine. What drew me to the story, more than anything, was the theme of fatherless young women. I, too, was a fatherless young woman up until last November when I finally met my biological father--a physics professor from Venezuela.

Fabiola, the beautiful Mexican model, and Yuliet, the beautiful, sassy and broken sixteen year old prostitute from Cuba are amazing to watch. Both young women grew up without knowing their biological fathers and carry emotional baggage and pain locked up in their hearts. Although, the subject matter of child prostitution, despair and intense identity crisis seem heavy, the film is funny and uplifting. It also is emotionally rich and may very well make you cry. I found myself wishing the best for both young women. Their beauty and strength of character really struck a chord in my heart. Thank you to the director and the young women who brought so much to this story.

August 31, 2004

Poetic Loving Film Makes a Mockery of Mockumentaries

This 1997 movie, much of it filmed along the sea wall in Havana, is a beautiful, playful, and ultimately deeply moving exploration of two young women, the incredibly vivacious 16-year-old promiscuous Cuban Yuliet Ortega and her green-eyed Mexican model would-be mentor, Fabiola Quiroz. I agree with the San Francisco Chronicle quote that only a poet could have dared so much and succeded so completely. Among the many innovations here are a send-up of the popular "mockumentary" structure-these people are either real or an incredibly undiscovered bevy of the world's most accomplished Latin actors. There are many touching, laugh out loud moments-and the laughter is heartfelt, resulting from the innocent depths of youthful sweetness and naivete that mark these young Cubans' joyful and yet heartbreaking lives. Yuliet's white father has left on a perilous trip across the straits of Florida to settle in the United States; her mother has attempted suicide by immolation (she fails but then succumbs to a heart attack). She is raised by her toothless black grandma, who beats her but clearly loves her, and who talks about the Stanislavsky method and her thanks to Yuliet (Italian for Juliette) for finally allowing her to realize her dream as an actor. The film actually shows what is good about Cuba (Yuliet's presumably lambasting remarks about Castro are muted)-its interracial harmony, the abiding hope and sweetness of its citizens, and its freedom from the poisoning influence of souls sacrificed upon the altar of the dollar. Very innovative, deeply personal and credible (e.g., Yuliet: "I just want to say, to any of you who are still left in the theater, that I never did sleep with the director"), and ultimately a cinematic act of uncompromising love. June 5, 2003

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