Who The Hell Is Juliette?

There's no holding back a music-video director who gets to make his first real movie. In this inventive gem from Mexico, director Carlos Marcovich lays on the trickery, but he's not merely showing off. Jumbling fiction and documentary, he captures the fiery spirit of two young beauties whose old souls connect. Yuliet, a defiant Cuban teenager, meets Fabiola, a soulful Mexican model and actress, on a video shoot in Havana. Both have big dreams. Each is haunted by an absent father. But where the actress has the world before her, Yuliet is bound to her grand, beautiful, melancholy homeland. Or is she? Flirting with the camera, giving bad advice to her little brother, sharing her checkered sexual history, or -- again and again -- contradicting her director, Yuliet is incandescent, a walking wound with star quality. Who The Hell Is Juliette? meets her head on. Playful yet poignant, the film proves that sometimes more is more.

-- Scott Heller