Eye on Juliet (2017)

(In French, On TV, January 2022) I’ve been bouncing all over Kim Nguyen’s filmography lately, trying to understand how he could go from an oneiric fantasy in 2002 (Le marais) to a hard-core techno-thriller sixteen years later (The Hummingbird Project) and every film in-between has been a graduated step from one end to the other. In Eye on Juliet, for instance, we have a modern-day romance facilitated by (barely fictional) robot drones remote-controlled from across the globe. Here, a young American man keeping track on a North-African pipeline from Detroit is gradually drawn into the life of a young couple over there, and sets out to facilitate their emigration. Bridging the link between Un ours et deux amants and The Hummingbird Project, there’s some high technology, some romance and some dreamlike interludes, as the magic of automated translation and some unusual characters give an added dimension to the techno-tools used here. There are some inevitable similarities here with such similar drone thrillers as Good Kill or Eye in the Sky, but a few specific peculiarities as well. If Eye on Juliet has its limits, however, it’s in being perhaps more interesting conceptually than through an overlong execution even at 96 minutes –a sign of an undercooked premise stretched too long. It probably would have worked better as an anthology segment than a feature-length film. On the other hand, it’s a clear progression in Nguyen’s filmography.