Fröken Julie

Plot synopsis:
The play opens with Jean walking onto the stage, the set being the kitchen of the manor. He drops the Count's boots off to the side but still within view of the audience; his clothing shows that he is a valet. The playwright describes the set in detail in naturalistic style. Jean talks to Christine about Miss Julie's peculiar behavior. He considers her mad since she went to the barn dance, danced with the gamekeeper, and tried to waltz with Jean, a mere servant of the Count. Christine delves into the background of Miss Julie, stating how, unable to face her family after the humiliation of breaking her engagement, she stayed behind to mingle with the servants at the dance instead of going with her father to the Midsummer's Eve celebrations. Miss Julie got rid of her fiancé seemingly because he refused her demand that he jump over a riding whip she was holding. The incident, apparently witnessed by Jean, was similar to training a dog to jump through a hoop.
Jean takes out a bottle of fine wine, a wine with a "yellow seal," and reveals, by the way he flirts with her, that he and Christine are engaged. Noticing a stench, Jean asks what Christine is cooking so late on Midsummer's Eve. The pungent mixture turns out to be an abortifacient for Miss Julie's dog, which was impregnated by the gatekeeper's mongrel. Jean calls Miss Julie "too stuck-up in some ways and not proud enough in others," traits apparently inherited from her mother. Despite her character flaws, Jean finds Miss Julie beautiful or perhaps simply a stepping stone to achieve his lifelong goal of owning an inn. When Miss Julie enters and asks Christine if the "meal" has finished cooking, Jean instantly shapes up, becoming charming and polite. Jokingly, he asks if the women are gossiping about secrets or making a witch's broth for seeing Miss Julie's future suitor. After more niceties, Miss Julie invites Jean once more to dance the waltz, at which point he hesitates, pointing out that he already promised Christine a dance and that the gossip generated by such an act would be savage. Almost offended by this response, she justifies her request by pulling rank: she is the lady of the house and must have the best dancer as her partner. Then, insisting that rank does not matter, she convinces Jean to waltz with her. When they return, Miss Julie recounts a dream of climbing up a pillar and being unable to get down. Jean responds with a story of creeping into her walled garden as a child—he sees it as "the Garden of Eden, guarded by angry angels with flaming swords"—and gazing at her longingly from under a pile of stinking weeds. He says he was so distraught with this unrequitable love, after seeing her at Sunday church service, that he tried to die beautifully and pleasantly by sleeping in a bin of oats strewn with elder flowers, since sleeping under an elder tree was thought to be dangerous.
At this point Jean and Miss Julie notice some servants heading up to the house, singing a song that mocks the pair of them. They hide in Jean's room. Although Jean swears he won't take advantage of her there, when they emerge later it becomes apparent that the two have had sex. Now they are forced to figure out how to deal with it, as Jean theorizes that they can no longer live together anymore — he feels they will be tempted to continue their relationship until they are caught. Now he confesses that he was only pretending when he said he had tried to commit suicide for love of her. Furiously, Miss Julie tells him of how her mother raised her to be submissive to no man. They then decide to run away together to start a hotel, with Jean running it and Miss Julie providing the capital. Miss Julie agrees and steals some of her father's money, but angers Jean when she insists on bringing her little bird along—she insists that it is the only creature that loves her, after her dog Diana was "unfaithful" to her. When Miss Julie insists that she would rather kill the bird than see it in the hands of strangers, Jean cuts off its head. In the midst of this confusion, Christine comes downstairs, prepared to go to church. She is shocked by Jean and Miss Julie's planning and unmoved when Miss Julie asks her to come along with them as head of the kitchen of the hotel. Christine explains to Miss Julie about God and forgiveness and heads off for church, telling them as she leaves that she will tell the stablemasters not to let them take out any horses so that they cannot run off. Shortly after, they receive word that Miss Julie's father, the Count, has returned. At this, both lose courage and find themselves unable to go through with their plans. Miss Julie realizes that she has nothing to her name, as her thoughts and emotions were taught to her by her mother and her father. She asks Jean if he knows of any way out for her. He takes a shaving razor and hands it to her and the play ends as she walks through the door with it, presumably to commit suicide.

Tags: revenge, romantic, flashback

Review:
MISS JULIE is one such film, and it seems entirely fitting that one of the greatest Swedish films ever made should be based on the work of one of Sweden's greatest writers.
Every single aspect of this film is perfect; the black and white photography, the wonderful musical score by Dag Wiren, the acting from all the cast, but in particular from Anita Bjork who sets a standard in playing Miss Julie that could hardly be bettered.
The play which provides the screenplay is of course devastating with the inexorable interplay between class and rank, and human desire and lust overlapping and intertwining, and too, the now almost forgotten concept of "duty" and "honour".
If you like movies that make you think, eat away at your heart and memory long after you have seen them, then I cannot recommend MISS JULIE more highly.
Based on a well-known play by August Strindberg, Alf Sjoberg's Miss Julie depicts the struggle for survival between classes and genders in late 19th century Sweden that leads to confusion and tragedy.
Because of its frank portrayal of sex between a lower-class servant and an upper-class aristocrat, the play was banned in Europe until 1906 and in Britain until 1939.
Compellingly played by Anita Bjork who completely captures her character's erratic willfulness, Miss Julie, the 25-year old daughter of Count Carl (Anders Henrikson) is estranged from the society in which she grew up and fights against the restrictions placed on her because of her status.Julie is a rebel who treats social conventions of the time with disdain, though she still demands to be treated as a proper woman.
Having recently broken up with her fiancé (Kurt-Olof Sundström) after what would now be called an S&M incident in which she literally makes him jump through hoops like a trained dog, she is open for sexual adventure.
The adventure she finds takes the form of the handsome butler Jean (Ulf Palme) whom she seduces following the drunken revelries celebrating Midsummer Eve, a pagan ritual.
It is an act which, though only mildly reprehensible today, was viewed as depraved in Strindberg's time and led to the author's characterization of Julie as being "sick".Although Jean is engaged to the cook, Christine (Marta Dorff), neither Jean nor his fiancé object because they see the act as an honor due to Julie's social position.
To escape from their untenable situation, the two lovers talk about leaving on the next train to Switzerland where Jean fantasizes about owning a hotel but the tangled web they have woven leads to unforeseen consequences.One of the highlights of the film for me was the seamless inter-mixing of dream intervals and flashbacks from childhood.
In her dream, Miss Julie is high up on a ledge or mountain.
In flashbacks, Miss Julie recalls how her mother Berta (Lissi Alandh) saw herself as a feminist who was opposed to marriage and only wanted to be the count's mistress.
When she gave birth to a daughter, she exacted her revenge by raising the girl as a boy and carrying on various misdeeds until the estate went bankrupt.Despite its anachronistic and morbid social outlook, Sjoberg's Miss Julie is not a grim experience.
The director lightens it up considerably with country scenes of folk dancing, horseback riding, and rowing, all in an idyllic setting, beautifully photographed by Goran Strindberg.
Though it reflects Strindberg's distorted view of women as hysterics, Miss Julie is a superb film and a treat for the senses, both visually magnificent and wonderfully performed.
It has a well-deserved reputation as being one of the greatest Swedish films of all time..
a pick for best cinematic translation of Strindberg to screen.
Alj Sjoberg's Miss Julie is superior film-making to the kinds of expected adaptations of iconoclastic plays one might usually see.
This Miss Julie moves, when at its best, like a real MOTION PICTURE (not to overstate it, just to put the words in bold), where Sjoberg's camera moves in fast and smooth, transfers between present and past with one simple sweep (this part seems the most influential in future post-modern films), and combining music, lush outdoor locations (it IS midsummer night after all) and acting that's fit for the screen just as much as for the stage if not more-so.
Reading the play years ago, I was struck by how it would be hard to translate this past the one-room setting, where Julie and Jean confront and have the wild possibility of leaving everything to chance and becoming lovers elsewhere.
This was the case with the 1999 adaptation- a respectable but unremarkable turn- but in this much older case it's a sweeping saga of romance plagued by class distinctions and just plain old childhood problems still sticking their claws into present affairs.
It's surprisingly fresh in its old-fashioned sense.At first it looks like Sjoberg could be deviating from the bulk of the tone of the Strindberg play and start to make a much livelier version of the material (how that could really be *done* I can't say), with the horde of people dancing and rollicking in frivolity like it's the last days before the new century.
But it's a very wise move of contrast: while all the townspeople and others among the Count's lot go into a delirious frenzy here there and everywhere, there's Julie and Jean all abound in their neuroses and dangers of new-found existential connection.
While Sjoberg doesn't have much trouble in translating the tone of the basic material- of the difference between rich and poor struck away by the desire to just see these two talk like human beings, warts and all, without the confines of their set places and alignment with those they should be with (Jean with Ingrid, Julie with Lord knows whom)- the trick Sjoberg had was with his style and casting.On both fronts, as luck would have it, he has it made.
Anita Bjork is an excellent Julie, and the actor playing Jean is also fantastic at displaying an apt trait of showing off as at times being sincere and not sincere, confusing and riling up poor dear Julie, taught from her youth to hate and be wary of men by her hateful mother.
Even little parts that might have been left shorter run in the original play are given further depth, Luke Julie's father, who's seen as something of a conflicted character as a man in power who ends up being much more caring (up to a specific point of incident) than her mother.
As for the style, as aforementioned, it's often breathtaking; sequences like the young Jean running away from the lot of adults after him for stealing is shot, edited and composed like something not quite of the early 1950s.
If it's a little dated here and there it should be expected, but Miss Julie is a delightful exercise in the unimaginable: an adaptation that lives up to the controversial and exciting spirit of the source..
Sjöbergs best movie.
It's fascinating how Sjöberg captures the different time-levels without interrupting the flow.
A true masterpiece and one of few Swedish films that measures up to Bergmans best work in the 50s..
While hardly relishing it the way the others have, it is surprising that a movie this good has gotten so little notice at this site, and for all I know maybe elsewhere.
Because it sprang from a play, and a rather famous one at that, it has a certain staginess about it, no matter how deftly it has been opened up, and I am not at all sure that the principals were the right ones, good as they are.
Nevertheless, there are many fine things about them and it, and it is certainly a better movie that a good eighty or ninety percent of the ones that came out during the fifties.
Perhaps the clumsiness of the S and M stuff could have been softened into a little more subtlety, there is just too much of hip hop quality to it that does not seem felt, since Strindberg usually used a sledgehammer for that sort of thing, and almost had to from the narrow horizons of stage, words words words being all that he had at hand, but Sjoberg demonstrates such a fine feel for the camera that he could have turned it into something a lot more powerful.
Also the limitations of budget seems a little evident, more or less working with what was in the neighborhood.Still this movie is not without its fascinations, and the childhood stuff has real nightmarish quality.
If you have not seen this Miss Julie, do yourself a favor.
Miss Julie double-bill, 1951 Vs. 2014.
It's double-bill time, two movie adaptations of MISS JULIE, August Strinberg's play written in 1888, with 63 years apart.
Shot in dashing Black and White, Sjöberg's film stars Anita Björk and Ulf Palme as the central pair, Miss Julie, the daughter of a Count (Henrikson) and her servant Jean, during the mid-summer night, they test the limit of seduction, passion and dignity between two incompatible classes, it shared the prestigious Grand Prize in Cannes with Vittorio De Sica's MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951).Empowered by an impactful score from Dag Wirén, the film conjures up the pair's gender-and- class tug-of-war with a phantasmagoria of sequences narrating their dreams and past.
The desire for falling versus an ambition of climbing from different starting tier concretes Julie and Jean as perfect specimens to explore their moral and emotional clashes.
There is no win-win situation in the battle of sex, Miss Julie's paradoxical attempt to patronise her servant and at the same time to be sexually overtaken by him is a self-digging grave for her own undoing, and Jean's struggle between his sexual impulse and deep-rooted inferiority complex is the last nail on her coffin.Anita Björk embodies a graceful mien of nobility emitting a whiff of recalcitrance that makes her portrayal of Miss Julie a distant, spoiled figure never truly reveals her true emotions, whereas Ulf Palme delicately betrays his insecurity and immaturity out of his pseudo-confidence and prince-charmant appearance.
Among the supporting cast, Dorff's Kristin, the cook, takes a less prominent function than Morton in the 2014 film, and we also see a very young Max von Sydow giggling in his plain nature.
Overall, this vintage oldie is a pleasant discovery, especially compared to the more lyrical but problematic latest version directed by the acting legend Liv Ullmann.With a running time around 130 minutes (contrast with 89 minutes of Sjöberg's picture), but maximally axing the bit parts with three characters only (save the two-minutes opening sequence showing a young Julie rollicking in the forest), Miss Julie (Chastain), the butler John (Farrell) and Kathleen the cook (Morton), this austere version is set in Ireland, and is much more loyal to the text's original form with its take-no-prisoners' method to let the acting-trio wrangling in the turmoil with lengthy monologues and dialogues.
It is a chancy choice, Ullmann invests a full trust in her cast, and is willing to take the risk of prolonging the takes to let the emotional repercussions permeate, even music is barely used as an immediate mood-mediator, only at times playing in the background with unobtrusive volume."The night is long and it is so tiring", the film becomes tedious as the same plot and twist blathering on and on; and "class is class", the invisible barrier strips them down to their inveterate bias and beliefs.
Morton, her Kathleen becomes a morally righteous yardstick to the scandalous affair, John is her beau, and Miss Julie is her mistress, her inward feeling is given a more detailed vent to show off, and Morton is always excellent to watch, modest in looks, but tremendously engaging.
Farrell, portrays a quite different character from Palme, his John is more approachable to read, more pliable to manipulate, also more reprehensible to condemn for his cowardice, the explicit canary-murdering scene makes him more like a perpetrator than a foolish social-climber in the end.Chastain stands at odds with Farrell and Morton's Irish accent, but her mercurial personae are wondrous to stare, this could be a tour-de-force if it was on stage, yet as a film, her labour (the same can to said to Farrell and Morton) cannot redeem the sluggish rhythm and a length overstays its welcome, in a sense, only true savant of stage play can luxuriate in it, for most people, the 1951 version is more superior..
Sjoberg takes a Strindberg play and converts in into a superb movie.
The dramatic conflicts faced by the characters is intense and plausible and almost painful to watch.The theme is the repression of women and sexual expression, and the rigid class system, in Sweden around the turn of the century, many years before the liberating effects of the victory by the Social Democrats in the election of 1932.
It is exemplified by the disastrous attempt by Julie, the daughter of a count, to find love with a man who is well-educated, strongly respectful of his place, very handsome and personable, but of the servant class.
Sjoberg directs with the hand of a master, some scenes expressionistic, some impressionistic, close-ups as needed, long shots perfectly fitted in.If you are not familiar with Sjoberg, note that a big part of Bergman's startup came from his collaboration with the older Sjoberg on the movie Torment, in which Sjoberg directed and Bergman wrote the script and served as assistant director..
It is the second movie by Sjöberg I see after Hetz, and it seems to me that he bestows an unparalleled sensibility to scenes and to individual characters.
This comes as a blessing to Miss Julie, since the Strindberg characters are a more or less neurotic and unsympathetic lot, who needs all the empathy the viewer can muster.
It is the story of a dangerous liaison between the noble Miss Julie and her manservant Jean.
The story takes place after the damage is done, as during the night-long midsummer festivities the two contemplate running away.
Now, the times that one of the two change their mind about running away or not cannot be counted on two hands, an it is a good example of why I normally cannot stand stageplays by people like Strindberg, and certain love/hate Bergman movies like Scenes from a Marriage and Saraband.
But the immaculate rendering of feelings and passion that stream towards you again is the saving grace and lifts this movie to a much higher level than any of Bergman's gut wrenching offerings.
Plus, there are some brilliant narrative goodies like the extremely elegant flashbacks, which intertwine seamless with the present, or the rhythm of calm scenes with emotional ones and the punctual reoccurance of the noisy meandering midsummer night party (acts sort of a Greek choir to the two mains).
Max von Sydow has an unsympathetic bit part, many years before he played for Bergman in Seventh Seal.
A filmmaker's masterpiece of Strindberg's play.
He does this by moving back and forth in time, capturing reminiscences, dreams, present events, and future imaginings through seemingly seamless film techniques.
On the contrary, the viewer is caught 'up in the act' and feels as if he is seeing or experiencing it as it unfolds in the characters' minds.
just about anything you can imagine about good film making is used just here to enhance ideas and feelings.
(There is a similar look in Julie's eyes as she spies on a working class couple having sex in the barn.) The mood of the film is generally sunny and bright since it takes place on a folk holiday full of fun and merrymaking, Midsummer's Eve Themes of this film concern the characters' roles and stations in life; how their stations influences the way they see things; and the hypocrisy of the strict class structure in late 19th Century Sweden.
The film also involves the roles of women and men of the Swedish upper class.
This is demonstrated by showing Julie's mother—in retrospect--as an extreme iconoclast of the traditional gender roles—trying to raise Julia as a boy until her father finally interferes.
The lead roles are brilliantly played by Anita Björk (as Miss Julie) and Ulf Palme (as her servant, Jean).
The two only come into social contact after Miss Julie breaks off her engagement with her fiancé and then crashes the working folk's Midsummer's Eve barn dance.
Later, as Julie and Jean relate their dreams and pasts to each other--each full of twists and turns--the gap between their social stations appears to break down.
Look for a young Max von Sydow in this 1951 movie as a "hand." He is still acting and going strong!!
I have seen him in SO many movies over the years and he almost always makes the movie better.
I have seen other versions of this Strindberg play brought to film--most recently Liv Ullmann's 2014 version with Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton.
However, none seems to give me a more satisfying enjoyment of the play than the old black-and-white version reviewed here..
The young miss Julie (Anita Bjork) lives in a mansion with her father.
She has recently broken her engagement but is attracted to one of the servants, Jean.
They spend the midsummer night together, telling each other their memories and of their dreams.
Realizing that an affair between a man of the people and an aristocrat is impossible, they plan to escape to Switzerland.This film had an interesting influence abroad.
Alfred Hitchcock said he had hired Björk as the female lead for "I Confess" in 1952, after seeing her in "Miss Julie".
However, when Björk arrived in Hollywood with her lover Stig Dagerman and their baby, Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, insisted that Hitchcock find another actress.What makes this is a great film, beyond the absolutely gorgeous cinematography, is the intrinsic idea of class division.
Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie) (1951) Based on famous play, 
On Midsummer's Night.
Class, gender, social standing.
My somonka will be a love/hate letter to this film?