This film is a treat for the eyes throughout, and it's filled with amazingly detailed, intricate patterns of imagery. movielocke has mentioned the phallic symbolism, evident at the start when we realise that what Miss Julie is staring at is the erection of that giant maypole thing (not sure what the correct term for it is), her eyes wide with fascination just as they are later when she watches von Sydow and the girl having sex in the barn.
In both those scenes, Julie watches from a height, while the commoners dance far beneath the maypole and the couple roll around in the straw; when we are introduced to Jean, we see him from a low angle with lines of trees towering above him. So the opening shots anticipate the respective dreams of Julie and Jean.
Then there's the animal imagery, which reinforces the inability of either character to escape their position: Julie flits around behind the curtain just as her greenfinch flits around in its cage; Jean is pointedly associated with the horse that pulls the carriage (the camera lingers on the horse as it trots along), handsome and dignified in its way, but essentially bound and servile. Jean eyes the statues interspersed among the trees - throughout the film, nude statues suggest the sexuality lurking behind the aristocratic refinement of this estate. The commoners dancing mockingly around the maypole; Julie gazing down at them from atop her pillar; Jean resentfully lusting after the 'golden eggs in the nest' at the top of the tree, and smirking at the pretensions of his flesh-and-blood superiors; servants drunkenly groping the statues... A running theme in this film is the exposure of the ivory tower as nothing more than a giant erect penis, and the golden girl who lives at the top of it as nothing more than a common 'whore'. (Misogynistic it certainly is, I think, true to Strindberg's play - more on that below.)
As the film goes on it opens the play out with more and more confidence, indulging in some lengthy and elaborate flashback scenes. I'm in two minds about whether this works or not.
On a first viewing I was sold, because these scenes are executed with such style and flair, and because (again) they feed into the patterns of imagery that govern the whole film, helping to make it feel like a cohesive whole, and also helping to build the intensity - these scenes could so easily have slackened the pace and momentum of the play, and once or twice they threaten to do so, but generally speaking they just feel like part of the same prolonged fever dream.
One really nice moment I would single out: after Jean's unfortunate encounter with the young Julie following his adventure in the Turkish pavilion, he scrubs up and goes to church to catch a glimpse of her. A burly official directs him to one of the seats near the entrance. We see the official poke a sleeping parishioner with his stick, to wake him up. Then we see Miss Julie, enthroned amongst the better sort in another part of the church, falling asleep herself - Jean sees this, and closes his eyes in emulation of her, in an attempt to share whatever she is experiencing - the stick pokes him in the head - the official sneers at him, then looks approvingly at the sleeping Julie. When we dissolve back to the present day, Miss Julie is listening to Jean's story with her eyes closed, not sleeping as she had done in the church, but immersing herself in the story Jean is telling and the world he is conjuring up - a world that, for her, is as distant and beautiful as hers was to Jean all those years ago when he closed his eyes in the church.
She comments on the beauty of the story, and asks Jean where he learnt to tell stories like that - he explains that he is emulating his betters. And indeed, the part of the story about his attempted suicide turns out to have been pilfered from somewhere else. When he tells that part, he tries to evoke the feel of the oats he lay on by saying that they felt like human skin, appealing to Julie's sensuality, her desire for those natural, earthy, bodily pleasures she has always been so cut off from - Jean's hand hovers over Julie's, stroking the air as he describes the oats, and she is visibly aroused by the gesture.
The flashback picks up on what Strindberg is doing in this scene and develops it with exactly the kind of confidence that is so often missing from screen adaptations of plays. The shifting power dynamics between Jean and Julie, the way that each of them envies and tries to emulate the other, the centrality of class and sexuality in this conflict - it's all suggested with beautiful economy and flair. There are even moments when it feels like this is the ideal way to present Strindberg's play, as if perhaps this is how he would have done it if he'd been making a film instead of writing a play. Apparently Sjöberg was influenced by Strindberg's later, more experimental dramas, in his expansions on the original text. I haven't read these, sadly.
But another really nice effect is the technique of having figures in the flashbacks walking around in the present day scenes, or having the camera pan seamlessly from one time period to another; as far as I know this wouldn't have seemed as hackneyed a gimmick in 1951 as it would do in a film today, but in any case it works really well here, blurring the boundaries between past and present to show how the two are inextricably locked together: the past cannot escape becoming the present, and the present cannot escape the consequences of the past.
Ultimately, though, on a second viewing, I ended up feeling that these flashbacks were a mistake, and re-watching the Mike Figgis version just now I realised why this was.
The great thing about Figgis' film is that it captures precisely what makes the play so powerful (I should mention that I've never seen any other performance of the play, but I'm talking about my sense of it from having read it). Strindberg's play reads like a sustained, utterly mad, utterly compelling rant on a variety of subjects - class, sexuality, gender, feminism - that has nothing really coherent to say about any of these particular subjects, and that features characters whose psychology and motivation seems to alter wildly from one moment to the next.
But for me this is why it's so brilliant, because far from trying to make a 'point' about anything, it ends up being a pitch-perfect representation of the mad, chaotic agony that is the human condition. A person has no stable identity from one moment to the next - we don't know what we're doing or why we're doing it - none of the structures or conventions that govern our existence make any sense - our relationships with other people are founded exclusively on self-serving abuse and/or violence - our ambitions are hollow and even if they weren't they are unattainable - and we're all going to die and none of us will be saved. At least that's how I like to see it. In this light it's a truly horrible work of art, deeply dispiriting on every level, but a great and thrilling experience.
The trouble with Sjöberg's film, then, is precisely that it does such a good job of picking up on Strindberg's 'messages' on those more mundane subjects, especially gender relations, and expounding them. Hence the misguided scenes involving the count and Julie's mother, the young Julie wearing boy's clothes, the men doing women's work, the fire (Berta emerging from the flames to the tune of the Wedding March). It's all horribly on-the-nose, and however well executed these scenes are, they are expanding upon precisely that part of the play that isn't worth expanding upon. From what I know of Strindberg's life, this anti-feminist bilge was driven largely by his resentment towards his wife, Siri von Essen (his Miss Julie), and also by an increasingly paranoid belief that the feminists (among other groups) were ruining his career. The only way not to be sickened by this aspect of the play is to recognise it for the incoherent, biased, deeply personal nonsense it is, and enjoy it as one more garish thread in Strindberg's misanthropic tapestry.
As long as the play remains an intense, claustrophobic, one-set drama, it works like a charm. Jean and Julie are two animals writhing about in a kitchen, by turns lusting after and tearing into each other, and doing it at such a pace that we can never pause to orient ourselves (Strindberg insisted on no act breaks or interval) or unravel the various conflicts playing out to try and make sense of them.
By elucidating these conflicts through flashbacks, and by fleshing out the rest of the world around Jean and Julie, Sjöberg makes the story and its misogyny more cohesive and deliberate, less batshit-insane and therefore much more offensive. By the time we get to that final shot, it actually feels like quite a stupid film. Still a fascinating and brilliant one in many ways, but how disappointing that Sjöberg put so much energy and effort into bolstering the play's mindless diatribe against the 'half-woman' - that is, the progressive woman who therefore
of course hates all men and deviates from the natural order in various other ways until what can she do but slit her throat.
Can anyone suggest a way of reading this film that perhaps subverts the apparent anti-feminism? Are we taking the misogyny too much for granted here?
movielocke wrote:I think the film asserts its own measure of feminism by the way Julie is aware of the patriarchical traps she's caught in, and that even running away with a lover does not represent any new freedom, just another sort of trap. By going so far as to kill herself, the story allows her actions to condemn the system much more effectively and accurately. So the story has both a feminist protagonist and a feminist antagonist, but the antagonist is fighting the same enemy as the protagonist, the culture of patriarchy, they are allies, in a sense, even if their tactics and motivations are very different.
But does the film have any sympathy for this notion of 'patriarchal traps'? Doesn't it just paint the mother as a crazed man-hater who plagues the fundamentally kind, decent count? If Julie is trapped by anything, isn't it precisely the progressive ideas she inherited from her mother, which make her incapable of inhabiting her natural station in life? But then, as jindianajonz said earlier, class and gender issues interact in complex ways in this play/film - considering that interplay might help to cast the misogyny in a different light, perhaps?