Everything is strange. Life. People. Everything is just muck, floating on the water until it sinks.So how ironic is it that I'm watching and blogging about a story that takes place on Midsummer's Eve, the longest day of the year, just as the upper half of our planet is about to reach the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year? Yeah, I know, it blows my mind too - I mean, what are the odds that I'd reach this exact point in my series (begun at the beginning of this year) on this very day? But that's exactly what's happening. What a juxtaposition! And Miss Julie's action not only takes place during the Summer Solstice, it's also happens in Sweden, way farther north than even Michigan, so the sun sets really late there, and rises really early. Which provides a perfect set-up for a drama in which quite a bit comes to light in a very short amount of time - and when the darkness settles in, it's very dark indeed.
Miss Julie turns out to be a nicely surprising discovery for me as I knew practically nothing about it and assumed (naively, I know) that it must be a relatively light entry into the Criterion canon. It was released on DVD back in 2007, around the time that I started paying closer, serious attention to the new films coming out on that label. I don't recall a whole lot of fuss being made about it in comparison to films like Two Lane Blacktop or The Naked Prey, issued around the same time. Maybe it was a nostalgia thing for guys my age who were kids when those two came out, still quite a ways from being born when Miss Julie debuted. Or maybe it has to do with the "isolationism" referred to in the liner notes regarding Americans' tendencies to sum up "all things Swedish" when it comes to films under the larger-than-life reputation of Ingmar Bergman. However it might be explained, my expectations coming into this viewing were that I'd find a stately, somewhat dry (but still worthy) addition to the catalog of emotional repression, internalized angst and existential bleakness that characterized other films I've seen from that year (e.g. The Browning Version and Diary of a Country Priest.) After all, isn't that pretty much what those Swedes excel at when it comes to making movies? (There I go, presuming Bergman again...)
I think some of those adjectives can be fairly attached to Miss Julie, but I'm glad to say that there's a whole lot more going on here, and it's very clear to me why Criterion included this in their collection. Miss Julie has an impressive pedigree as one of the most important plays of its time (late 19th century) and as a powerful vehicle for young female actors to perfect and present their craft on stage. In some circles (obviously, not those I travel in!) Miss Julie is a highly respected and renowned landmark in the development of modern theater, and the special features on this disc offer a great overview of the play's cultural and historic significance. August Strindberg, who wrote the play, is one of those names I've come across every so often when reading about the precursors to Expressionism, Surrealism and all that other edgy intense oppositional cultural stuff going on in the early years of the 20th century. He's regarded as the most influential of all Swedish writers, and Miss Julie is probably his most famous and widely-distributed work.
So that's enough on the background - follow the links if you want to learn more! The film itself offers a powerfully realized expansion of the play, taking some liberties with Strindberg's theatrical ideals, delivering by way of compensation for that compromise a vivid, tumultuous snapshot of the battle of the sexes that entertains and illuminates with every tension-escalating gesture committed by the two principal leads.
The story revolves around a woman, Miss Julie, the daughter and sole heir of an aristocratic family, and Jean, the lead manservant to the estate. Its narrative begins by showing her voyeuristic monitoring, from the shelter of her mansion, the cavorting of peasants as they raise a Maypole and proceed to carry on as peasants will when the light burns bright into the warm summer night. Cut off from the revelries, living under the moralistic burden of her times, but possessed of a haughty, imperious spirit inherited from her deceased mother, Julie turns out to be a very pretty bundle of hard-to-manage impulses, especially as she also has to cope with the pressures and scandal generated by a recently broken engagement. This clip shows where things went wrong with Julie's betrothal and also provides, especially in hindsight, some provocative foreshadowing (through her treatment of her dog Diana) of her own turn as a "bitch in heat," so to speak...
Right at the end of the clip, we see Jean and Kristin, the chambermaid to whom he's (somewhat less formally) engaged, or at least sleeping with. Jean, Kristin and Julie make up the entire cast of Strindberg's stage play, but director Alf Sjoberg wisely chose not to stay within the strict confines of the one-act situation that Strindberg conceived. Still, the central conflict unfolds primarily in that servant's kitchen, where Julie retreats after being pursued by a mob of zealous, presumably intoxicated and emotionally inflamed servant-folk who spot her dalliance with Jean and wonder just what's gotten into the young lady to the manor born...
Kristin functions as the salt of the earth, grounded in common-sense commentator on the story's central conflict. She's a plain woman who sizes up both Julie and Jean the way that most of us would, as misbehavers acting way out of line based on their station in life, and she winds up conventionally enough falling asleep just as the plot begins to really boil. Isn't that about how it normally goes though?
As Jean and Julie grope their way toward each other, first emotionally, eventually physically, we learn a lot about each of their childhoods as they grew up on either side of the invisible but all too real dividing line that separate their classes. He developed an early boyhood infatuation with her, while she just took a brief but momentarily fascinated notice of him when they were just kids. Now fate has unexpectedly cast her in his arms and they both wonder just what to do about it. These recollections, conveyed in both straightforward flashback depictions and more symbolic dream sequences, were delivered simply via dialog in the stage presentation, but Sjoberg uses creative and stimulating film techniques to bring the past and the subconscious directly on screen as we see images unfold right behind the characters as they speak. It's quite an effect, one of several that Sjoberg incorporates over the course of the film, as gates swing open directly in our face, close-ups zoom in, a spilled cask of wine morphs into a dispersion of merry commonerfolk, and numerous similar camera moves nudge us into renewed alertness just in case the verbal jousting between Julie and Jean fails to hold our attention.
After they've been left to themselves (off-screen) in their private chamber, Jean's social climbing ambitions lead him to propose an escape for the new "couple" to Switzerland, while the hard cold light of traditional reality settles in on Julie to reinforce just how reckless and deluded she's allowed herself to become. There's little I can do here, short of a blow-by-blow paraphrase, to approximate just how convoluted the exchanges between Jean and Julie become over the course of their night, so let me just say that if you enjoy the spectacle of a sharply-tinged battle of wits with both erotic and socio-political overtones, you'll find much to appreciate in the final forty-five minutes or so of Miss Julie. Be forewarned, as the plot unfolds, it fairly reeks of misogyny - Strindberg, himself the son of a servant, went through some real-life experiences between himself and his high-born first wife (he had three wives altogether, in a time when multiple divorce and remarriage was practically unheard of) that fueled his rage and resulted in a most definite point-of-view on the state of male-female relationships in his times. One need not be locked into a current or recently dysfunctional romantic entanglement to appreciate Strindberg's perspective; my marriage currently flourishes in a very happy condition that I aim to prolong as much as possible, but I still found quite a bit with which I could relate and learn from. Julie's mother Berta adopted a proto-feminist ideology that subsequently fueled rebellious attitudes and activities from both of them. I can't and won't speak for Strindberg here as to whether or not he actually rejected the precepts of feminism, but that influence doesn't come off very positively here. The young Julie is shown in boys' clothing doing man's work, while the men are subject by her mother's whims to carrying out the chores of milkmaids. Is it society's fault that the genders weren't ready to trade roles, or is there an inherent incompatibility between sex and certain social tasks? Just a morsel of the food for thought that Strindberg/Sjoberg set before us in this drama.
However one ultimately, personally answers those questions (and I'll be the first to grant that their answers in 2009/10 are almost certainly going to be a lot different than they were in 1951, or 1888, when Miss Julie was originally written,) we're presented with a film that in its way helped inaugurate a new cinematic era of frank presentations of previously taboo topics. As the American trailer put it, this film was "not for Junior!" Even though it would be quite a few years before Hollywood was willing to take the commercial risks associated with such a blunt portrayal of lust, hypocrisy and injustice among the upper-classes, world culture benefited from the relative obscurity of Swedish cinema and the loosening of social mores that happened at those far-northern latitudes. Miss Julie never enjoyed broad commercial success in the USA, but for those who knew, it was out there, forging a small but growing breach in the wall of censorship and denial that McCarthyism and related forces tried to impose on an intimidated populace. The film's grim ending, aiming to shock and disturb perhaps more than to deliver a definitive "moral of the story," is in my mind of less significance than its larger message that calls for a challenge and, if possible, overturning of the oppressive societal gridlock that kept Miss Julies of then and now locked up in their metaphorical cages.
Next: Ace in the Hole