The title character of Miss Julie is played by Anita Björk with a consuming passion that is constantly bursting from the seams of her repressive social status as one of the wealthy elite. The daughter of an unruly and bitterly angry mother who instilled in her a deep-seated hatred of men as a means of punishing her husband (here we get whiffs of Miss Haversham from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations), Miss Julie has recently broken off an engagement with her fiancée and now finds herself drawn to her father's valet, Jean (Ulf Palme, one of Sjöberg's favorite actors on both stage and screen), who is engaged to the homely family cook, Kristin (Märta Dorff). The story, then, is essentially a love triangle, although there is little love on display. At its core, Miss Julie is a seething portrayal of just how divisive the gap can be between men and women, especially those of a determined nature. It is, in essence, a war film, with the battle lines drawn across the genders and no one winning in the end.

The film, which not incidentally takes place at the height of midsummer, a time of celebration and reckless abandon in rural Scandinavian culture, is fundamentally a portrait of the power of sexual attraction and how it can literally bulldoze over anything in is way, whether those be class divisions or simply mutual dislike. Strindberg's underlying theme, which Sjöberg keeps decidedly intact, is the destructive nature of social divides--how they keep apart those who were otherwise meant for each other--but the film's fire comes from the sexual chemistry between the two leads.

There is no denying that the scandal involving a wealthy daughter getting involved with one of the servants is a relic of the 19th century that has little currency today (even in 1952 The New York Times's Bosley Crowther called it “antiquated” and “old-fashioned”), but the manner in which Miss Julie and Jean, who in no way like each other, act out a masochistic dance of simultaneous obsession and derision is strangely enthralling. We learn a great deal about both characters throughout the film, which in the original play was conveyed entirely in dialogue. In adapting it to the screen, Sjöberg keeps that basic structure, but opens it up by portraying the flashbacks and memories and even the dreams they describe. At one point, Miss Julie talks about the nightmares she has of falling from her lofty social perch, while Jean describes his inverse dream in which he imagines himself climbing up an enormous tree, which makes abundantly clear how they are essentially two sides of the same coin.

Sjöberg, who had been directing films since the late 1920s, has a firm command of the medium and knows precisely how to use tracking shots, framing, and rack focus to emphasis the emotional resonance of each scene. Miss Julie is not an aesthetically showy film, but in many ways it is a cinematic tour de force in illustrating how to take essentially static, talky material and infuse it with filmic energy. One of his most daring conceits is putting the past and present in the same frame, allowing Miss Julie and Jean's memories to walk into the room as they are reminiscing, a device this is beautifully evocative of how our past is always with us.

Not everything works quite as well as it should, though; for example, the film's portentous use of symbolism can feel a bit too weighty at times. Symbols of sex and death are everywhere, whether they be firing guns or billowing curtains or spilling wine, not to mention the scene in which Miss Julie spies feverishly on two servants (one played by a young Max von Sydow) literally rolling in the hay. All of this imagery and symbolism certainly adds an additional charge to the film, but there is enough overt sexual energy in the faces of Anita Björk and Ulf Palme to carry the film on its own.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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