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MISS JULIE Send This Review to a Friend
Something is amiss with "Miss Julie," Mike Figgis's film version of August Strindberg's classic play, even though the screen drama, scripted by Helen Cooper, earns our rapt attention. The ingredients are certainly there and in the hands of excellent actors--Saffron Burrows as Miss Julie, the unhappy daughter of a rich count, Peter Mullan as Jean, the footman with plans to climb above his station, and Maria Doyle Kennedy as Christine, a kitchen servant and Jean's woman.
In the tense three-person drama Miss Julie, bored, restless and sexual, becomes involved with Jean in a nasty, supercharged relationship. She is alternately abusive and seductive. He returns the favor in kind. She tries to keep him in his place. He schemes to get her money. Christine is a steely presence and knows Jean better than he knows himself. The nasty mating dance between Miss Julie and Peter has afforded the opportunity for searing, revealing drama on stage.
The problem here is that although on the surface Figgis is remaining true to Strindberg, in his manner of filming he approaches the material with a contemporary eye. The sex is ugly and explicit. The camera movements, angles and close-ups are voyeuristic. This is a film by someone trying to infuse the conflict with present-day sensibilities although the story is one of class and period set in a previous century and resists modernity.
As cast, Miss Julie and Jean make a strange-looking pair. Burrows is tall and overpowering. Mullen is wiry and comparatively short. Sex makes strange bedfellows, or standing up fellows in the way the carnality occurs here, but it is often difficult to accept what happens in the bitter, humiliating and destructive sparring between these two.
Figgis seems to have been the wrong director to tackle Strindberg. The result is compelling but on the gross side and one feels like a peeping tom watching these lives unravel. A United Artists release.
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