Film review: Miss Julie (1951)

This is it - film number 50 from our 50-film box set of "Classic Art House" movies, which I will get to next.  For basically the last ten, the films have been ones that I (or Jami, although she opted out of watching the last couple) have put off, expecting them to be a drag, and for all the others I've been pleasantly surprised.  However, I have to say that I made the right call with this one.  I found the characters unlikeable, which is not necessarily a strike against the film (or play, as it's an adaptation of a Strindberg play of the same name) if you could empathize with them to some extent, but they're also both a little bit crazy (well, Julie in particular is) and the products of systems that I never really encountered and about which I do not care (in the same way that watching The Crown holds zero appeal to me).  Basically it's a two-hander (except for flashbacks) of Julie, who is the troubled (and how!) daughter of a Count, and Jean, who is the Count's sort-of lead servant/Butler, whom Julie appears to be obsessed with.  

Both characters are both attracted and repelled by the other, her sense of exalted stature and his resentment against same definitely causing most of the conflict.  But also she was the product of a "modern" (I think the play is set either in or not long after Napoleonic times, because there's a painting on the wall of him and he is referred to as "The Emperor") union, or rather, mother, who not only refused to marry the Count (being perfectly willing to be his mistress, but he had eyes only for her), but laughed insanely (there's a fair amount of that in this, which always takes me out of a film) when she produced a daughter instead of the Count's longed-for son, but then, out of "progressive" motivations, insisted that her daughter be dressed and raised as a son (and that all the women on the estate do the man's work, and vice versa - cue humorous montages of each sex failing disastrously at their allotted tasks), until at last The Count intervenes and allows her to be a girl, and to have a doll (with the strange name "Blenda"), something the mother resents to the extent that it almost causes Julie's death.  I don't know how you can come out of the film without seeing the mother as the villain and a large part of Julie's troubles to be caused by her cross-gendered childhood, although I see that this play is supposed to have a feminist message (because of Julie's occasional outbursts against men - wishing they would all drown in a pool of blood, for example?).  I don't see it.  The only message I get is "everything is awful and people are selfish shits".

I will say that the setting, of Midsummer's Eve celebrations and the long daylit night over which the play takes place, is very engrossing, and the camera work, although jarring in places (the director loves ZOOMING in on a character's face), at least adventurous.  In fact the film looks a lot more modern than the content - it's as if it's being pulled to the future by the one and the past by the other.

Adding to the cruelty is that Jean seems to be two-faced, telling Julie he loved her as a poor child visiting the estate (when he first meets her he is reeking of shit because he's had to escape an outside lavatory through the toilet) and then later saying that was all made up.  He also veers between lust and disdain, and then occasionally is quite sincere with her, so that he appears almost as unstable as she does.  There are also moments when characters (okay, it's pretty much always Julie) stare into the middle distance and say portentous things about life, and I was vividly reminded of Groucho doing the same to much more enjoyable effect (and probably spoofing Strindberg or Ibsen, or those influenced by them [edit: apparently Eugene O'Neil, specifically Strange Interlude]).  Probably the person I feel for most is the Count, who seems a genuinely decent fellow (his servants all seem to like him, although his effect on Jean of unconsciously making him servile is one of the things Jean resents most) and who loved his strange wife and adores his strange daughter, right to the tragic end.  The film won at Cannes and I can see why the French would love it, and love the ending.  But it left me with an appreciation for Bergman's sense of humor, would you believe.