Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Swedish director Alf Sjöberg, born in 1903 in Stockholm, Sweden was one of the great contributors to Swedish cinema and an influence on Ingmar Bergman and a whole generation of Swedish filmmakers. He won the Palme d’Or at Cannes twice, the first time for Torment (1944), based on a script written by Bergman, and the second for Miss Julie (1951). Miss Julie was a skillful and mostly faithful adaptation of a play of the same title by August Strindberg, who is often regarded as Sweden’s greatest author. Internationally, he is best known for his plays though in Sweden he is revered for his novels, poetry, letters, and autobiographical works as well. All of Strindberg’s work is autobiographical to some extent, since his personal successes and failures, strained love relationships, class issues, misogyny, and deep psychological turmoil poured out into his literary products. It is impossible to understand the film Miss Julie without some understanding of Shrindberg’s play, and it is impossible to understand the play without reference to Strindberg’s life.

Historical Background: Johan August Strindberg was born January 22nd, 1849, in Stockholm. He was the third child in his family. His father, Carl Oscar Strindberg, was a shipping merchant and struggled financially, though he had been born into a family of some standing. Carl had married a domestic servant who had worked in his family’s household. Class distinction between his parents was an ever-present issue while August was growing up (which is clearly reflected in Miss Julie). Strindberg was emotionally sensitive and labile from childhood, being prone to rapid shifts in mood.

Strindberg began writing plays while still a student at Uppsala University. His first major mature work, Master Olaf, was written in 1877, when he was just twenty-three years of age and working as a librarian at the Royal Library in Stockholm. Though rejected by the Royal Dramatic Theater because of its irreverent treatment of Swedish national heroes, it is now considered the finest historical play ever written in Swedish. His novel, The Red Room, published in 1879, gained public attention before Master Olaf, and was thus his breakout work that brought recognition to his talent. It was the first novel in the style that became known as “Swedish Naturalism,” which shared many of the characteristics of the realism movement in literature.

Strindberg had a string of three failed marriages, each of which ended in bitterness and divorce. His experiences in these marriages is of central importance in understanding the characters in Miss Julie. In 1877, he married his first wife, Baroness Siri von Essen. She was already seven months pregnant at the altar. Though that child died, they later produced three who lived into adulthood. The marriage lasted twelve years, during which time Strindberg wrote several plays dominated by the battle of the sexes and love-hate relationships between husbands and wives, including The Father (1887), Comrades (1887), Creditors (1889), and Miss Julie (1889). Siri von Essen played the title role when Miss Julie was first staged in 1889, at about the same time that the pair divorced.

Strindberg was bitterly disconcerted and, feeling unappreciated in Sweden, he moved to south-central Europe. There, after two years of playing the bachelor artiste, he married a young Austrian, Frieda Uhl. Their stormy marriage barely lasted the year that they spent touring Europe. In 1895, the disconsolate Strindberg entered the darkest period of his life, known as the Inferno period. His mental breakdown during this period is described in his autobiographical novels, Inferno (1897) and Legends. Strindberg became interested in alchemy and occultism, during this time, and began the Occult Diary which he kept for eight years. Much of it pertains to his tumultuous third marriage to Harriet Bosse and their terribly conflicted sexual relationship. They fought, they separated, they divorced – and then they became lovers! Strindberg wrote, “At 50 I was no good as a husband, but at 58 I am good enough to be a lover!”

Strindberg’s return to Sweden in 1898 helped draw him out of psychological crisis and led to his expressionistic plays, which pertain to the unreality of existence. These plays, of which the best was A Dream Play (1901), were a seminal influence in the later movement that became known as surrealism. In 1908, Strindberg broke off with Bosse, discontinued his Occult Diary, and entered into a highly productive phase. Some of his last masterpieces included Easter, The Dance of Death, The Ghost Sonata (1908) and The Great Highway (1910). Strindberg died in 1912.

The Story: Miss Julie (Anita Björk) is the haughty twenty-five year old daughter of Count Carl (Anders Henrikson), born into privilege in a highly stratified society. Her family has many servants as well as peasants who work on the estate. It is Midsummer Eve, a popular pagan holiday in Scandinavia, when the provincials partake in a lusty festival, rebelling against the usual social strictures. Fueled by intoxication, the peasants dance gleefully about a maypole and then continue with barn dancing. Since disguise and deception are expected and the usual class distinctions somewhat set aside, unexpected liaisons and debaucheries are likely to develop. Poor virginal Julie, excited by some combination of hysteria, her period, and accidentally witnessing two of the servants locked together in the barn, is feeling like a bitch in heat and Jean (Ulf Palme), her father’s valet, is the most promising stud around.

Julie, it seems, has just had an engagement broken off by her fiancé (Kurt-Olof Sundström). Julie had only agreed to the engagement, in her words, “To make him my slave.” In fact, the cause of the breakup was the man taking exception to his “training.” Julie’s dog, Diana, a classy Doberman, had permitted herself to be impregnated by the gatekeeper’s mongrel and Julie had become infuriated when Diana had failed to come when called, preferring to continue with the butt-sniffing she was receiving from the mongrel. Julie had struck the dog with her whip and then demonstrated for her fiancé her command of her animal by ordering it to jump over her whip, extended like the crossbar of a high jump. Julie had then demanded that her fiancé also jump over the whip after which she’d whacked his fanny with the whip. After obliging her a couple of times, the fiancé had seized the whip and broken it in half, before stomping off.

With no fiancé to nibble on, Julie is stuck with trying to seduce the hired help. This agenda is delicate, however, because of the social impropriety of the Count’s daughter mixing with the servant class. Even being seen alone together would set the tongues a-waggin’, but a dalliance would be utterly scandalous. Julie’s masochistic tendencies are no less than her sadistic ones, however, and she’s determined to debase herself with the handsome but uncouth Jean. The logistics are complicated because Jean is more or less “engaged” to the cook, Christine (Märta Dorff). Christine, however, cares little whether Jean dances or copulates with Julie (it being something of an honor, given Julie’s status), as long as he keeps away from the buxom Viola (Inga Gill), who is merely another servant.

Julie and Jean have very different perspectives on life. Jean had grown up with seven siblings and a pig in a simple dwelling on an adjacent estate. Julie has spent her early life looking down on people, while Jean has been looking up. They share their respective recurrent dreams. “I have a dream that comes back again and again,” says Julie. “I’m high up and I can’t come down. It makes me dizzy. I want to come down but I haven’t the courage to jump. I can no longer hold on, I long to fall. And I’ll have no place until I do fall, down, down.” Jean’s dream is quite different: “I dream I’m under a tall tree. I want to climb up, up to the top and rob the nest, there, of its golden eggs. I climb and climb, but the trunk is too smooth and the first branch is so far away, but I’ll reach the top yet, if only in my dreams!”

Jean confides in Julie that he had seen her when he was little. He had snuck into the Count’s Turkish bathhouse when it was unoccupied, but had then had to sneak out through the waste hole when a woman had approached to use the bathhouse. Reeking of feces, little Jean had snuck into the Count’s mansion and had encountered Julie, immediately falling in love with her. She, however, was put off by the smell. Later, he had even taken the extreme measure of bathing and dressing up for church, just to see little Julie again.

Julie and Jean steal a few moments out of everybody’s sight in Jean’s small room. They emerge later, each rearranging their clothing, and slyly satisfied. Coupling, however, has not dissipated the distinction in their classes. It has merely added gender conflicts to the class conflicts. “Say you love me. Hold me tight, Jean!” says Julie, hopefully. “I’d like to, but I don’t dare here,” Jean replies. “Of course I love you, Miss Julie [reverting to the formality of rank], do you doubt it? Here there are barriers. We’ll go away to another country. Today, I’m a valet, in ten years I’m my own master.” Jean suggests that they can open a hotel in Switzerland catering to rich people. Julie wonders what her role would be. Jean suggests, “The mistress of everything! The ornament of the house. With your looks and your class, you’ll sit like a queen, giving orders, pushing electric buttons. I’ll pad the bills and you’ll sweeten them with your smile. Let’s leave on the next train.” His portrait of their future together horrifies Julie. “A valet is a valet,” she says, dismissively, reasserting her class superiority. “And a slut is a slut,” says Jean, asserting his chauvinistic superiority.

In a series of flashbacks, we now learn some of how Julie came to be who she is. Her mother, Berta (Lissi Alandh), had come from plain people, brought up to believe in equal rights for men and women. She was opposed to marriage. She had told the Count as much when he proposed and had offered to be his mistress instead! The Count, anxious to have the woman one way or another, had agreed to take her as a mistress, naively expecting this “arrangement” to be countenanced by his circle of acquaintances. Instead, he and his mistress had been systematically spurned. The Count, wanting a son to carry on his noble family lineage, had impregnated his wife, despite her firm reluctance to assume roles so grotesquely feminine as giving birth and raising a child. Berta had the last laugh in any case, providing the Count with a daughter, Julie, rather than the much-wanted son. Furthermore, Berta had insisted that Julie be raised like a boy, despite Julie’s own preference for her doll Blenda over plows and the slaughterhouse. Berta had also insisted that the male servants assume women’s duties while the women plowed the fields. Gradually the estate had gone bankrupt and Berta had burned down the house. Berta had then suggested that they rebuild by borrowing money from a “friend,” who was Berta’s lover on the sly. The Count’s discovery of the romance had led to his botched suicide attempt and Berta’s departure.

Back in the story’s present, time is running out on Julie and Jean. The Count will be returning home soon and is bound to discover what has transpired between his daughter and his servant. They will be hell to pay one way or another. They talk about running away together and Julie changes for travel and gathers her “love bird”, a caged parakeet, which, she insists must go with them. Jean makes evident that he is less convinced of that need by chopping the poor bird’s head off! Thus reminded of the irreconcilable gulf in their social backgrounds, Julie emotes, “I’d like to see your whole sex in a lake of blood. You think I want your child? Our noble line – extinct! But the servant dynasty continues in an orphanage, flourishes in the gutter, and ends in prison.” “Bravo, Bravo!” retorts Jean. “That was your royal blood speaking. Bravo!”

The Count arrives and the mere sound of his voice reduces Jean to his old menial self. He has been called to fetch the Count’s boots and coffee. He tells Julie, “If the Count ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot.” This she decides to interpret as the best available answer to her own last plea to Jean, “Help me! Command me! I’ll obey like a dog!” Moments later, the Count finds Julie dead on the floor, her throat slit. He glances up and sees the portrait of his wife gazing down on them, her vengeance now complete.

Themes: Strindberg had a fascination with the psychology of his era, especially when it could be exploited as justification for his essentially misogynistic view of women. One popular concept of the day, to which Strindberg subscribed, was the label “hysteric”, applied almost exclusively to women. The word, in fact, derived from the same root as the modern term “hysterectomy,” indicated a relationship to the female reproductive organs. The idea was that woman suffered from a variety of emotional and psychosomatic disorders as a displacement of sexual repression. Early in the play, Miss Julie is described as having become “wild”, reminiscent of the famous instance of a Republican cabinet officer dismissing his wife’s erratic behavior as “rampaging hormones.” Julie is disgusted with her dog, Diana, because she sees herself all too clearly in the dog’s deficiencies. She, too, is prepared to copulate with the human equivalent of the gatekeeper’s mongrel.

Obviously another element in Julie’s degenerate state of femininity, by Strindberg’s account, is her mother’s proto-feminism. Following the all too common defense of chauvinism, Strindberg takes the basic notion of gender equality and sets out to show how it leads to economic ruin, destructive parenting, and marital warfare. Under her mother’s masculinizing influence, Julie has developed a preserve need to dominate and emasculate men. Her whip is her phallus. When her fiancé symbolically breaks the engagement by breaking her whip, he takes away her masculinity. That, plus it being Midsummer Eve, reduces her to slut status, in desperate need of being serviced.

Julie is a highly conflicted woman. So was her mother. Her mother claimed to believe in equality but could never satisfy herself that she had achieved it until she was entirely dominant. Julie has acquired her mother’s contempt for men, but yearns to experience her femininity as well as to step down from that elevated perch where the superiority of her social class has placed her. She lets herself imagine, momentarily, an idealistic world where class and gender no longer matter because she and Jean love each other so deeply. Jean, however, has no such idealized concept of love to share with Julie. His lower class view of male-female relations is more straightforward. If she’s to be his woman, he’ll use her as he sees fit – for corrupt money making schemes or to order her about. Julie, who isn’t used to being ordered about, balks at his lack of sentiment. Jeans retorts, based on his years of experience, “An order always sounds unkind. Now you know.” There can be no genuine kindness or equality when orders are given. An order is the imposition of one person’s will on another.

Jean is conflicted as well. He simultaneous worships Julie and degrades her. He worships her for her classiness and beauty but is contemptuous of her as a woman. He complains to Christine that Miss Julie had gotten dirt on her sleeves and then praises her shoulders and other body parts. By class he feels inferior, but by gender superior. Lower class men typically resent class distinctions while upholding chauvinism. See the film Swept Away for another example of this phenomenon. The poor man doesn’t know how to respond to Julie’s flirtations – as humble servant or dominate male. Jean refuses to sit down in Julie’s presence in the kitchen until she orders him to do so. She offers him a beer and then orders him to toast her on one knee, in mock gallantry. He kisses her boot but then insists that they must stop their flirtation or they might be discovered. Later, however, when she has degraded herself to his level by offering herself to a mere servant, he is more than comfortable about dismissing her as a “slut.”

Why does Julie kill herself in the end? I don’t believe there is a satisfactory answer that is internal to the story. What we’re seeing portrayed in this story are Strindberg’s own torments, not those of a realistic literary character. Julie manifests the qualities of Strindberg’s first wife to which he was unable to adjust. Siri even played the role when the play opened. Whatever level of equality she demanded was clearly more than Strindberg’s misogynistic orientation could fathom or tolerate. For such a crime, suicide was the only just outcome in his mind.

Production Values: Although I personally find little of value in Shrindberg’s view of male-female relationships, everything else about this film is close to flawless. The black-and-white photography is very beautiful, on a par with the very best films in that format. The flashbacks are conducted with extreme grace, without any obvious demarcation and yet easily understood for what they are. There are times when we see both the present and the past in the same frame, as Julie, seated in a chair, describes one of her memories as it plays out in the background behind her. There are some interesting double-exposures and surreal imagery. The musical score, by Dag Wiren, is outstanding.

The performances are all very strong. The standout is Anita Björk as Julie. It is a passionate performance from beginning to end, relentlessly demanding. She played in Secrets of Women in 1952. She is every bit as beautiful as Bergman’s great Swedish female leads, such as Ullmann and the Andersson sisters. Ulf Palme was very good as well and, of course, you’ll notice the great Max von Sydow, in a minor part in this particular film.

Bottom-Line: This is a hard film to rate. Everything about this film is darn near perfect except the source material. Other than the choice to adapt Shrindberg, everything falling within Alf Sjöberg’s control is carried out to perfection. I very much like and concur with a point made by Stephen Murray about this film: “The screenplay could serve as a textbook for exteriorizing a powerful work for stage and making it fluid and completely cinematic.”

I have no intention of questioning the high esteem in which Shrindberg is held as a writer, but I strongly disagree with his thematic perspective in Miss Julie. The story is mainly about male-female relationships but it is being told by a man who notoriously failed in three marriages while nearly perfecting a misogynistic stance toward women. I prefer to learn something useful from a film to wallowing in a dysfunctional perspective. Despite Shrindberg’s bleak portrait of relationships, I very much enjoyed the film for its cinematic merits. I’m going to give the film four-stars, taking an average between five-stars for cinematic qualities and three-stars for thematic content. Miss Julie is in Swedish with English subtitles and has a running time of 90 minutes.

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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Sweden:

The Best Intentions
Cries and Whispers
The Magician
Persona
Scenes from a Marriage
The Seventh Seal
The Shame
Smiles of a Summer Night
Through a Glass Darkly
Torment
The Virgin Spring
Wild Strawberries

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older