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
standing for opposite levels of class standing
than a believable interchange and affair between two individuals who happen to
come from the opposite ends of the social strata of 19th century
Swedish culture.
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.
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,
and 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, that 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. Certainly she 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
kind of early version of Edward Albee’s George
and Martha, torturing each other unto death; Julie’s mother, after all, was a kind of ur-Rebecca, burning down
her own house instead of willing the deed to her obedient servant, Mrs.
Danvers, as in the Hitchcock telling.
One has to think of Sjöberg’s filmed Miss Julie as a kind of
re-interpretation 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 (with a tie for De Sica’s Miracle
in Milan) as the best film of 1951.
Los Angeles,
April 18, 2017
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