Strindberg's 1888 play "Miss Julie" is (with "The Dance of Death") his realist masterpiece. The great 1950 film of the play in many ways is more like Strindberg's symbolist/expressionist plays such as "The Ghost Sonata." The play is set entirely in the kitchen of a count's manor house and is heavy in monologues. The film gloriously opens up the setting and replaces the monologues with flashbacks. The screenplay could serve as a textbook for exteriorizing a powerful work for stage and making it fluid and completely cinematic.

For me, the first hour is perfect, the final half hour somewhat irresolute, perhaps because the motives of the characters are so alien to me.

The plot

The film begins with the servants celebrating Midsummer's Eve (as in Bergman's later "Smiles on a Summer Night"). The title character (played by the very blonde Anita Björk) is the only member of the family about. Her mother is dead, her father celebrating elsewhere. Miss Julie has just broken off her engagement to a young man, who like her dog, she trained to jump over her riding crop. It quickly becomes clear that she has stuck around to seduce Jean (Ulf Palme), the coachman who is engaged to the cook (Inga Gill) and is incapable of thinking of having intimate relations with his social superior.

She succeeds in her plot to dispense with her virginity, though not without considerable difficulty of avoiding detection by the rest of the staff, particularly Jean's fiancée. They are set to elope in the morning, but Julie's father Count Carl (Anders Henrikson ) returns early. His morning coffee takes precedence over anything else. The guilt-ridden Julie is appalled at Jean's cringing and his throttling the caged bird she wanted to take with her as part of living happily ever after, cuts her throat.

Motivation

The background of Julie's warring parents (a typical Strindberg couple for whom marriage is mortal combat) is shown in flashbacks, some shot with the present-day Julie in the same frame. There are also flashbacks within flashbacks. I don't think that today's audience has any trouble understanding what is going on or was going on in what is shown in flashbacks. Why, though, is a more difficult question. Yes, yes, she had an unhappy childhood, and there is the hysteria that was seemingly rampant among European upper-class women in the period before the First World War, but giving -- or, thrusting -- her virginity on a dim but attractive man does not strike me as being a capital offense. And it's hard for me to consider such a misalliance as the last chance for happiness of a young woman with many resources, not least her fresh appearance.

Despite my own Scandinavian ancestry, I don't understand the such suicides or such despairs. I guess I'm just a shallow American optimist. I can admire the technique (which it would be hard to overpraise), but I do resonate on Strindberg's (/or director Alf Sjöberg's) wavelength.

Conclusion

There's not denying that the ending is bleak and ultra-puritan. Much of the film is pagan revels of the servants, and everything is photographed gorgeously. Sjöberg's film is a triumph of design, the design serving the text even more closely than the masterpieces of Sergei Eisenstein or Max Ophuls do. (For me, this is the highest standard for comparison.)

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Since the categories epinions forces me to choose answers from are so irrelevant to psychological dramas, my selections of answers are meaningless.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age