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Movie Review: 'Miss Julie' The seductive 'Miss Julie': Mike Figgis discovers lust in the kitchen Friday, March 03, 2000 By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette Movie Critic
In August Strindberg's "Miss Julie," it is Midsummer's Eve -- the one wild night of the year when upper and lower classes are allowed to mix. Julie bursts into the kitchen of her family estate, hot and amorous, and makes shameless advances to Jean (Peter Mullan), a dangerously handsome footman.
Jean has fine manners, but he steals and schemes -- the new lower-class man with low morals. After a danse macabre of token resistance, he "gives in" to her, and she to him. But her naive belief that love is involved -- and that he will take her away from the emptiness of her life -- will be brutally disabused.
Why does a countess come down to the kitchen for a servant? From enormous loneliness and inner despair. "The moment you go into the kitchen, you become the kitchen," said America's late great acting teacher Stella Adler of this character.
"Miss Julie is crazy tonight," says Jean in the opening Midsummer's Eve scene, a pagan revel of sexuality sans romance that is perfectly choreographed by director Mike Figgis. Julie dances with her vulgar servants, whirling from one to another in abandon.
Saffron Burrows in the title role is suicidally provocative, naked lust beaming from her great crazy eyes as she indulges in a sadomasochistic seduction of Jean. Julie is out of control emotionally from sexual desire. The seduction -- or is it a rape? -- takes place in a claustrophobic kitchen, essentially the only set in what is essentially only a three-character drama.
Character No. 3 is kitchen maid Kristine (Maria Doyle Kennedy in an excellent, empathetic performance), Jean's "fiancee" -- a simple woman who knows her place and her class and is offended to the core for social rather than jealous reasons by Julie's theft of her boyfriend. The two classes are spiritual enemies, and there is chaos in their mixture. In the plays of Ibsen, servants are always very loyal. In Strindberg, just a few years later, they relish the downfall of their betters.
Julie and Jean are like Blanche and Stanley in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Miss Julie and her class are going down in the 19th century as Blanche and Southern society will go down in the 20th. There is no way to help such doomed people.
"Miss Julie" was written in 1888 during the breakdown of European "rules," when order was lost to the desperate needs of the moment and hopelessness of life under the new values of industrialism, Darwin, Marx and Freud. With society in terrible transition, Strindberg saw woman as compelled by the historical moment to be grasping for more than her capacities permitted.
Strindberg -- a misogynistic moralist who had two nervous breakdowns -- was the first psychological dramatist, the most radically anti-feminist and the most influential of his time. (Eugene O'Neill said he owed his Nobel Prize to Strindberg.) He hated modern woman for her "masculine" competitiveness and what he considered her diabolical manipulation.
The struggle was no longer between man and society but between man and woman, a primitive survival of the fittest. What Strindberg unleashed in "Miss Julie" between man and woman is what Mike Figgis renders -- often with hand-held camera -- in this grim, theatrical, uncompromising and disturbingly good film: total war.
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Rating: R for adult sexual themes and language