Or: "How to Have a Husband and a Lover without Having Any Responsibility in the Matter." A romantic fantasy-thriller that might have sprung from the pages of the Women's Slicks, complete with poetry readings, sudden gusts of wind, a honeymoon car crash, a brooding artist (rock singer Sting, whose experience with music videos has apparently raised his threshold of embarrassment above that of normal mortals), Italian palazzi and piazze, etc. The Julia and Julia of the title are really just one Julia -- Kathleen Turner is her, or them, or whomever -- with two separate planes of reality. On one, the husband who was killed six years earlier turns out not to be dead after all, and Julia is as much in love with him as on their wedding day instead of as after they'd had a child and she'd taken a secret lover. On the other, she's a widow of six years who is only now getting to meet the lover she's already involved with on the other plane. It's all quite beyond imagining, or anyway it's beyond the moviemakers' imagining. They -- most prominently director and co-writer Peter Del Monte and co-writer and original story thinker-upper Silvia Napolitano -- are content just to create paradoxes, not to confront them. How the heroine's consciousness knows which plane to be in at any given moment, what triggers the passage between them, is perhaps the biggest mystery. But there are plenty of other gaps of logic you could fall into and not find your way out of before movie's end. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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