Miss Julie

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Even though Swedish director Alf Sjöberg made his first film--The Strongest--in 1929, it wasn't until the 1940s that he really focused on movies. Before that he was more renowned for directing plays for the Royal Dramatic Theater, establishing himself as one of Sweden's most important stage directors. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that Miss Julie, one of Sjöberg's most celebrated films, is an adaptation of August Strindberg's 1888 one act play of the same title.

Made in 1951, Miss Julie shared with Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan that year's Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival--an honor that Sjöberg had also received in 1946 for his Torment, Ingmar Bergman's first official screenwriting credit. According to several film reviewers, Bergman once admitted that Sjöberg was sort of a mentor to him. Whether or not that's fully accurate, in Miss Julie (for which Sjöberg himself wrote the script) one can certainly detect a resemblance to Bergman's affinity for disconcerting subject matters, and strikingly acute directing methods.

Set in the late 19th century, the film concentrates on the relationship between a rich proprietor's daughter, Julie (Anita Björk), and one of her servants, Jean (Ulf Palme). Relaxed in the absence the father and master Count Carl (Anders Henrikson), and carried away by Midsummer's Eve festive atmosphere, Julie and Jean let themselves go, dancing, flirting, and exchanging their life stories. But when they become romantically and physically involved their affair takes an emotionally sadomasochistic turn where each one of them, releasing repressed feelings, seeks to alternately hurt, humiliate, and dominate the other. With its beautiful black and white cinematography, extraordinary performances (including a young Max von Sydow in his second film role), and innovative stage-inspired techniques—flashbacks signified by the coming and going of people on the same set, projections of memory sequences in the background—-Miss Julie is a brilliant, racy, intense, and politically incorrect meditation on gender, sex, love, and class struggles that will both trouble and stay with you.

Besides featuring a lovely new, restored high-definition digital transfer, the Criterion DVD also includes a video essay by film historian Peter Cowie, an archival television interview with director Sjöberg, and a worthy 2006 television documentary about the play Miss Julie and August Strindberg.