Miss Julie
UK/USA 1999
Reviewed by Peter Matthews
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
The north of Sweden, midsummers night, 1894. In the kitchen of a country estate, the cook Christine upbraids her fiancé Jean, the footman, for dancing with the Count's daughter Miss Julie. Julie commands Jean to dance with her again. On his return, he and Christine fondle each other. Julie interrupts them and orders Jean to put on clothes befitting a gentleman. When Christine falls asleep, Julie asks Jean to drink beer with her. Then she insists he kiss her shoe. In the garden, Julie flirts with Jean, but slaps him when he kisses her. Back in the kitchen, Jean describes his impoverished childhood and confesses his desire to rise. When revellers erupt into the kitchen, Jean hides Julie in his room and there seduces her. Afterwards, he confesses his dream of owning a hotel and proposes that they run away.
Jean suggests Julie rob her father to finance the scheme. Drunk, Julie leaves to search the Count's desk. Christine appears and surmises what has occurred. She demands that Jean accompany her to church, and tells him to shave. Julie returns with the stolen money and a suitcase. When she tries to take a pet bird along on the journey, Jean kills it. After a confrontation with the pair, Christine goes to church alone. Julie asks Jean to give her the razor. The Count rings from upstairs, and Jean hastens to attend him. Julie slashes her wrists.
Review
Though August Strindberg's 1888 play Miss Julie is one of the great war horses of western theatre, few film-makers have been drawn to the material, and it's easy to see why. Strindberg himself worried that audiences used to the pomp and circumstance of 19th-century stagecraft would not accept a brooding chamber piece where just three characters (Miss Julie, the well-heeled daughter of a Count, and servants Jean and Christine) are confined to a single set. Striving for a heightened realism, the Swedish dramatist arranged the action in an unbroken flow and (shocking at the time) instructed the players to turn their backs on the spectators now and then.
In this regard, Miss Julie anticipated the sustained voyeuristic illusion that is cinema; still, screen adapters have largely steered clear of a work that puts so many obstacles in the way of conventional opening out. Once an unassailable classic, Alf Sjöberg's 1951 version seems to have fallen off the map of late, despite the stunning virtuosity of its flashbacks, through which the tortured heroine's past was made to occupy the same physical space as her present.
The one indulgence director Mike Figgis permits himself in his bargain-basement version (the film was shot chronologically over a relatively short period of time) is a brief split-screen sequence showing the erotic grappling of Julie and her footman lover Jean from fractionally varied angles. Other than this redundant bit of punctuation (which anticipates his extended split-screen experiment Timecode), Figgis has burned off the slightly disreputable swank that characterised such earlier pictures as Internal Affairs. Far from opening out the theatrical frame, he closes it down, not only keeping to Strindberg's kitchen set, but pinioning the actors with a mock-vérité style that emphasises every blemish and fleck of lip spittle. The movie was shot on Super 16mm using two handheld cameras, which judder and lurch as though whipped up by the stormy passions; the editing could have been done on a butcher's block, so prodigal are the mismatched eyelines and jarring reverses in screen direction. While Figgis isn't quite as root-and-branch in his asceticism, it would appear that Dogme 95 has spawned another fellow traveller. By sacrificing the frills of mainstream film-making, he presumably hopes to free the play's primal anger. In this, he follows Strindberg, whose jagged psychodramas were an assault on the stuffy conventions of bourgeois theatre.
High-born Julie is possessed by a fantasy of wallowing in the mud, while the rising young Jean entertains few illusions about his motives in seducing the Count's daughter. Their liaison carries a kinky sadomasochistic charge, and that's perhaps what caught Figgis' interest - it's hard to miss the parallels with the destructive symbiosis of the couple in Leaving Las Vegas. Screenwriter Helen Cooper faithfully preserves the play's vituperative atmosphere, and indeed amplifies it by a coarsening of the language (when Jean narrates a childhood recollection, his monologue builds into a scatological aria). Since it was only censorship that inhibited Strindberg from spelling out the earthier implications of his naturalism, this is one case where vulgarisation makes sense. Indeed, the film shows thought and care in practically every detail; so it's a real cause for regret that it never catches fire. Saffron Burrows gives a technically accomplished performance as Miss Julie, but is perhaps working too hard to arouse much pity and fear. Or perhaps the wobblyscope technique is at fundamental odds with Strindberg's tightly deterministic structure, and ends up cooling things down when it should heat them up. Simplicity, you're left thinking, may be the toughest goal to achieve in movies.
Credits
- Director
- Mike Figgis
- Producers
- Mike Figgis
- Harriet Cruickshank
- Film Script
- Helen Cooper
- Based on the play Fröken Julie by August Strindberg
- Director of Photography
- Benoît Delhomme
- Editor
- Matthew Wood
- Production Designer
- Michael Howells
- Music
- Mike Figgis
- ©Daza Productions Ltd. and Gallery Motion Pictures Ltd.
- Production Companies
- Moonstone Entertainment presents a Red Mullet production
- Developed with the support of the European Script Fund
- Developed in association with Left Handed Pictures Limited
- Executive Producers
- Annie Stewart
- Willi Baer
- Etchie Stroh
- Co-producer
- Jacquie Glanville
- Associate Producer
- Barney Reisz
- Production Co-ordinator
- Charlotte Bevan
- Assistant Directors
- Deborah Saban
- Olivia Lloyd
- Mari Roberts
- Script Supervisor
- Mary Boyle
- Casting
- Director:
- Jina Jay
- ADR Voice:
- Louis Elman
- Additional Dialogue
- members of the cast
- Bird Animatronics
- John Issacs
- Special Effects
- Alan Senior
- Model Maker
- Ian Barratt
- Art Director
- Philip Robinson
- Set Decorator
- Totty Lowther
- Draughtsperson
- Lynne Huitson
- Scenic Artist
- Andrew Garnet-Lawson
- Costume Designer
- Sandy Powell
- Costume Supervisor
- Kay Manasseh
- Hair/Make-up Designer
- Peter King
- Key Hair/Make-up
- Kathy Ducker
- Titles/Opticals
- Cine Image
- Optical Co-ordinator:
- Martin Bullard
- Music performed by
- Medici Quartet
- Violin 1st:
- Paul Robertson
- Violin 2nd:
- Steve Morris
- Viola:
- Ivo van der Werff
- Cello:
- Tony Lewis
- Rosmersholm Quartet
- Violin 1st:
- Ann Morfee
- Violin 2nd:
- Christopher Tombling
- Viola:
- Andrew Byrt
- Cello:
- Ingrid Perrin
- Musicians
- Solo Cello:
- Caroline Dale
- Folk Fiddle:
- Dermot Crehan
- Percussionist:
- Frank Ricotti
- Additional Music Directing/Arranging
- Nick Ingman
- Music Supervisor
- Louise Hammar
- Music Engineer/Music Producer
- Mark Tucker
- Engineer
- Austin Ince
- Choreography
- Scarlett Mackmin
- Sound
- Pawel Wdowczak
- Sound Re-recordists
- Mike Dowson
- Mark Taylor
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Nigel Heath
- Dialogue Editor
- James Feltham
- Sound Effects Editor
- Julian Slater
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Darren McQuade
- Editor:
- James Feltham
- Foley
- Artists:
- Jason Swanscott
- Dianne Greaves
- Recordists:
- Edward Colyer
- David Tyler
- Editor:
- Arthur Holland Graley
- Food Stylist
- Anna Bogue
- Animals
- Jackie Rowberry
- Animal Dramatics
- Cast
- Saffron Burrows
- Miss Julie
- Peter Mullan
- Jean
- Maria Doyle Kennedy
- Christine
- Tam Dean Burn
- Heathcote Williams
- Eileen Walsh
- Sue Maund
- Joanna Page
- Andrea Ollson
- Sara Li Gustafsson
- Bill Ellis
- Duncan MacAskill
- Katie Cohen
- Helen Cooper
- Flora Bradwell
- Ernestine Hedger
- Martin Gordon
- Barbara Miles
- Reg Beecham
- Paul Duncan
- Richard Burnett
- Charlotte Mcleod
- servants
- Olivia Coles
- Santi Rieser
- Oliver Swan Jackson
- children
- Sinead Jones
- Griselda Sanderson
- Christian Weaver
- musicians
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Optimum Releasing
- 9,082 feet
- 100 minutes 55 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- In Colour