Perfect time of life...

This post is part of Nathaniel's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series in which the participants must post a single image from a movie he or she deems as the "best shot" for any particular reason.

The movie Julia opens the film with a solitary woman on a boat as a voice narrates, talking about wanting to remember things. It's a curious start to a movie whose title character isn't the main character at all, but instead is the object of strong fascination, or memory, to the actual main character Lillian played by Jane Fonda. Vanessa Redgrave plays Julia, Lillian's best friend since childhood. With the film mostly relegated to Lillian's point of view, we only ever really see Julia through Lillian's remembrances and daydreams thus never really becoming a character in her own right and instead becoming a sort of mythic figure.

The moments recollected when they were young shows how much Lillian idolized her older friend while the ordeals Lillian imagined Julia to have suffered through later in life displays a heroic and brave figure. All of it could be true of course, but the writer Lillian would of course want to think best of her beloved friend. So to follow her lead, my best shot pick is that "perfect time of life" for Julia...

There are women who reach a perfect time of life...
when the face will never again be as good...
the body never as graceful or powerful.

Not only is it an objectively fierce shot of Redgrave, but it's probably the image that Lillian herself keeps of her friend in her mind even after years have passed and she's sitting on a boat and wanting to remember "what was there for me once." It's a bittersweet sentiment, but also quite affecting in the end.