out of the kitchen, into the past
by Douglas Messerli
Alf Sjöberg (screenplay, based on
the play by August Strindberg, and director) Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) / 1951
When I first read August
Strindberg’s Miss Julie, I tried to
imagine how this play might be staged. To me it still seems more like a stilted
dialogue between figures
I would have loved to have seen Sjöberg’s original stage production,
which obviously kept closer to Strindberg’s original, just to see how he
achieved credibility. But his choices in the cinema version make it clear that
he, too, must have seen the limitations of the original. For in his film he
opens up the previously claustrophobic space of the kitchen, adds large swaths
of additional dialogue, and plays out the celebrations of estate peasants on
Midsummer’s Eve.
Yes, I know that Strindberg surely meant his play to be claustrophobic;
that is why the “crazy” Julie wants out. But by confining the play to one room,
the author merely accentuates his heavy-handed thematic. We do need to see Julie in her natural element, and in
Sjöberg’s evocation of her among her natural surroundings, she (Anita Björk) is
a beautiful woman to behold. Without a horse and carriage to drive, her
father’s valet, Jean (Ulf Palme) has no real identity; as he admits near the
end of their brief affair, he is, after all, still a servant, despite his
clever talk and grand ideas of opening up a hotel in Switzerland.
I’m not sure we need to be told the whole history of Countess Berta,
Julie's mother
(Lissi Alandh), but in doing so,
Sjöberg both questions and reifies Strindberg’s famed misogyny by presenting
her as an early feminist who even goes so far as to force all the males of the
estate to work at tasks usually assigned to women, demanding that the women take
over the male roles. As the narration makes clear, however, this leads to
disaster. That does help to explain, moreover, Julie’s toying with men like
Jean and her temporary ecstasy in her one-night stand. It is clearly apparent
in Sjöberg’s version that despite her control over men, Julie has managed to
remain a virgin.
If nothing else, her detailed upbringing completely explains her suicide
after any dreams she and Jean might have had for escaping this bleak paradise
when the count returns and Jean goes back into his reliable servant mode.
Given her upbringing, we realize at work’s end that Miss Julie was
destined to either be a bitter old maid or to destroy herself. She surely might
never have served as a companion for a man like her accountant-fiancé
(Kurt-Olof Sundström).
Perhaps, if Jean had not caved in, they might have lived out their lives
as a
One has to think of Sjöberg’s filmed Miss
Julie as a kind of reinterpretation of Strindberg’s play, a work that
ultimately questions not only the original construction but its logic. If
nothing else, the director, who clearly loved Strindberg, challenges the
playwright’s didacticism, opening up at least other possibilities that the
stage-bound characters have no room to explore. The beautiful scenes of love
and lust on the day in which the sun never sets, remind one, more than anything
else, of Bergman’s magnificent Smiles of
a Summer Night, made only four years later. That’s good enough for me!
(When I wrote this, I had not yet read Peter Matthews essay for the Criterion
film version, which points out this same possibility of influence upon
Bergman).
And the judges at the Cannes Film Festival voted this (with a tie for De
Sica’s Miracle in Milan) as the best
film of 1951.
Los Angeles, April 18, 2018
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).
No comments:
Post a Comment