Miss Julie

Nothing outside of Saffron Burrows and Peter Mullan exists while watching this film. I sadly missed it in the theatre, but rented it just recently. The intensity of the interplay between Julie & Jean, and the play of chemistry between Saffron & Peter, completely absorbs. No room, no telephone, no kitten getting into things, no knock on the door. A physical sex scene that feels like a mental rape. A servant Aristocrat and an Aristocratic servant: how far does a social role penetrate our being? The air of the film brims with violence, loathing, mutual envy and lust but...no gun, no breast. The emotional manipulations between the characters manipulate the viewer's emotions much more than any weapon or nudity could. The performance of Saffron Burrows is absolutely astounding. One moment you loathe Julie, the next you just want to comfort her. Peter Mullan works in perfect tune with Burrows and even when the characters onscreen are at odds, there is perfect harmony within the player's performances. Through the film you feel as though you can see through layers and layers of this character Julie and at the end are left numb, but awe-stuck. Thank You Mike Figgis, Saffron Burrows, Peter Mullan and Maria Doyle Kennedy! (now, to pick up kitten's fun. . . )

August Strindberg is one of Sweden's most important writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ‘Miss Julie' is one of Strindberg's plays written around the turn of the century. This is a powerful story of anger, hate, lust and class envy. The play revolves around two main characters. Jean (Peter Mullan) is a footman, a servant to a Count in northern Sweden in the late 1890's. Julie (Saffron Burrows) is the Count's shrewish and self loathing daughter.

Jean is tormented by his attraction to Julie and his simultaneous hatred of her class. The play focuses on an encounter they have one midsummer's night in the servants' kitchen. Jean takes his resentment out on Julie with sarcastic remarks and open disdain for the gentry of which she is a part. She responds sometimes docilely and contritely, and at others with condescending vitriol. This open antipathy belies their sexual attraction and the embattled conversation leads to a seduction, which is really less of a seduction than a mutual ravishment. Afterward, as Julie is more vulnerable, Jean attempts to manipulate her into stealing money from her father and running away with him so he can indulge his secret ambition to own a hotel and become a part of the upper class he now so despises. The film ends on a decided downbeat, which is no surprise given the characters' deeply disturbed personalities.

The story is intense, intelligent and visceral. It is has more the feel of a play (one set, crude props, only one or two costumes per actor). However, though the acting is more that of a theatrical production, it is shot more like a modern motion picture. Director Mike Figgis does a good job with the camera, using some innovative techniques to keep it from looking like you are watching a play through a window.

The story is likely to be appreciated by only a very small audience. Not only is it very dark, but all the characters are distasteful. Jean is angry, sardonic, obnoxious and manipulative. Julie is shrewish, condescending, self hating, and insecure. There is really no one with whom the audience can identify. This renders the entire story potent but extremely unpleasant. Also, it deals with themes that were mainstream in 1900, but are generally beyond the ken of today's audiences.

The actors were fabulously cast and the acting superb. Peter Mullen is short, craggy and Napoleonic, while Saffron Burrows is tall, willowy, and graceful. Besides being well cast for their stations, she was at least four inches taller than he, and this worked well with all the allusions to the aristocracy being `up there' and the servants being `down here'.

Peter Mullen played the part flat out. He was pugnacious and full of indignant rage, envy and spurn. The acclaim Saffron Burrows received for this performance was well deserved. She handled the difficult range of emotions deftly, moving effortlessly from whimpering child to haughty bitch and all the complex self torturing emotions in between.

I rated this film an 8/10. This is not a film for everyone. In fact it is a film that most people will probably dislike. I would recommend it for the ardent theatergoer who is a battle tested veteran of microscopic character studies involving flawed characters. To like this film you have to be one who can appreciate trying and disturbing emotional portrayals without a need to like any of the characters. For everyone else, it will probably be a harrowing and disagreeable experience.

Mike Figgis' 'Miss Julie', an adaptation of a Strindberg play, tells the story of a relationship struggling in the face of class divisions, and protagonists torn between their obsessions and ambitions. Figgis gets intense performances out of his cast, the music (written by himself) is excellent and in spite of its origins on the stage, he avoids an overly static feel; and the language (rendered in English) seems fresh. But the characters themselves are a little too archetypal, their feelings theatrically contrived into dialogue; personally I couldn't care too much about their ultimate tragedy. An immaculately made film, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.

The word 'Strindberg' enticed me. How close this movie is to the play, I have no idea. But there are a few questions that marred the movie for me: Why would the stablemen take the word of a scullery maid over a footman in giving up the horses for his escape?, Why would the woman want to commit suicide? What drove her mad?

Having had a friend who did commit suicide, I know that in her last stages of depression she fell in love with an ex-con who delighted in telling us how he and his buddies killed another inmate at Kilby Prison with a broom handle. She was highly educated, artistic and giving.....we all should have seen the signs. So this woman's dalliance with an ambitious footman (who at first seems quite virtuous) is to be understood.

See the movie and tell us how close it is to Strindberg himself.

Sexual and power politics get a late Victorian Era workout in `Miss Julie,' Mike Figgis' bleak, rather stagy adaptation of August Strindberg's classic play. Saddled with what is essentially a one-set, two-character chamber piece, Figgis has chosen, for the most part, not to open-up the work cinematically very much, but rather to concentrate on the stark human drama at its core. This editorial decision keeps the film more faithful to the spirit of the original author's intent perhaps, but it also, by necessity, limits the possibility that we will see Strindberg's work in a new and exciting way.

In his tale, the Swedish author strips the age-old theme of the eternal class struggle to its barest, bleakest essentials. Miss Julie is a beautiful young countess who feels trapped by the stifling provincialism of her privileged position. She yearns to climb down off her well-guarded pedestal and experience life in all the rawness and vigor with which she imagines the lower social orders live out their days. During a Midsummer celebration, in which she attends the raucous revels of the servants in her employ, she begins to make sexual overtures to Jean, a man whose position in the house is that of her father's loyal footman and who, in a parallel of sorts to his mistress, feels just as strongly as she does the stifling demands of his less-than-privileged position. In direct opposition to Miss Julie, Jean has always yearned to gain acceptance in the very social world from which she is trying to escape. Together, they attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap between gentry and peasant on the common ground of mutual sexual attraction. They discover, though, that some gaps exist never to be filled and that the interjection of the sexual element into their relationship can result in at best only a temporary reversal in their power positions before the much stronger forces of the societal caste system reassert themselves and restore the `normal' balance.

Strindberg's characters and the relationship between them are very complex in their nature. Although Miss Julie and Jean appear to be groping for a safe middle ground where the two of them can find a level of stasis and equality, mostly they end up constantly shifting positions of power in a class struggle that can never be ended in the time and society that has entrapped them. We sense the futility of their aim all throughout the play – and the bitterness and harshness of their love/hate relationship imply that the characters sense it as well. This is why `Miss Julie' must inevitably end in tragedy for all involved. The world at that time offered no alternative endings for such a situation.

By bringing a raw physical intensity to their roles of the would-be lovers, Saffron Burrows and Peter Mullan help to modernize the characters, emphasizing the sexual passion that holds them in its grip.

It is difficult to know how Figgis, as director, could have expanded the play beyond its claustrophobic theatrical limitations without violating the spirit of the work. For his refusal to in any way really open it out in cinematic terms, `Miss Julie,' for all its intensity of theme and character, ends up as a rather static, talky film. Thus, it is left to future directors, I suppose, to take up the challenge of making a real movie out of `Miss Julie.' If they can only figure out how!