Who The Hell Is Juliette?

Yuliet Ortega is a 16-year-old Cubana who lives in a rough, rundown neighborhood in Havana; Fabiola Quiroz is a successful Mexican model who divides her time between music videos in Latin America and fashion shoots in New York City. They have three things in common: startling green eyes, an obsession with their absent fathers, and the passionate interest of filmmaker Carlos Marcovich, who has intertwined their stories into a lively, evocative mix of fact and fiction titled Who the Hell Is Juliette?

Marcovich plays Ortega's great, bursting energy and barking laugh against Quiroz's introspection and melancholy. If he's making a point about differences in national characters, it's nicely undersold and flows without a trace of editorializing. Their difference is like that of the mountains and the sea, of stony self-sufficiency and bubbling openness.

Both women have significant ties to North America. Quiroz's mother traces her daughter's green eyes to her long-vanished father, a Canadian archeologist on a dig in Michoacan. Ortega's father, who abandoned his family during the Mariela boatlift, turns out to be an electrician living in New Jersey. This is a fine example of what happens when a filmmaker follows the logic of a subject that intrigues him rather than conforms to a preset script. Who the Hell Is Juliet? seems to be discovering itself as it goes along, just like its two appealing heroines. --Dave Kehr