Bashar Shbib (a Syrian Canadian working out of LA) and Daphna Kastner (she wrote the story, co-wrote the screenplay and is Julia) have made a small-scale, rough-hewn independent movie, set largely in an apartment at Venice Beach, which is bound to be a wow with twentysomethings of all ages.
Julia, an ordinarily pleasant-looking girl who writes kids' books and dreams of romantic and erotic fulfilment, lives with a wimpy publisher (Charles) who lurves her and desperately wants to marry her. Actually, he desperately wants the archetypal middle-class wife of yesteryear, who cooks, sews and raises the children. Julia is unenthusiastically mulling over his proposal when she receives a phone call from a stranger (Duchovny, a Richard Gere lookalike who plays transvestite Denise in Twin Peaks). The pair spend the day getting acquainted - intimately - by telephone, which brings "shit hits the fan" consequences for all three protagonists, but true liberation for Julia.
'Julia' has the raw freshness of Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth, though it's hotter on the raw than the fresh, and the audacity, but not the maturity or sophistication, of sex, lies and videotape.