Linking Past and Present in Sjöberg's 'Miss Julie'

Lovers and Adversaries: Ulf Palme as Jean and Anita Björk as the title character in Alf Sjöberg's Miss Julie, adapted from August Strindberg's classic play.

 
I

What's the best movie adapted from a play? A lot of strong contenders come to mind, ranging from Laurence Olivier's versions of Hamlet and Henry V to Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, based on the Hecht-MacArthur farce The Front Page. At the moment, though, I cast my vote for Swedish director Alf Sjöberg's Miss Julie (1951).[1] Viewing it for the first time earlier this year (and three times since), I was enormously impressed by its stylistic panache and the plentiful ways in which it "opens up" August Strindberg's claustrophobic stage classic of 1888. The essentials of the original drama remain, but Sjöberg (1903–1980), who also wrote the script, turned the material into a full-blooded work of cinematic art. For me, the film was a revelation, and in many ways I prefer it to the original.

Sjöberg's accomplishment is especially remarkable given the fact that he was as celebrated for his theatre work as for his filmmaking.[2] One might expect a Swedish director steeped in stage production to treat one of his country's most famous theatrical pieces with cautious reverence and fidelity; Sjöberg, however, placed no such constraints on himself. Whereas Strindberg's play is confined to a single set, the downstairs kitchen of an aristocrat's manor house, and features only three speaking parts, Sjöberg's film ranges far and wide over both the country estate's exteriors and interiors and includes several additional speaking roles, as well as what appear to be at least a hundred extras. What's more, he infuses the proceedings with a boisterous energy—even flashes of humor—that one doesn't usually associate with Strindberg. Not a bad artistic choice, in my view.[3]

Fig. 1: Raising a maypole
at the Midsummer's Eve celebration.

The film's departures from—or, more accurately, expansions of—the original drama begin with the very first scene (fig. 1), which depicts a huge celebration of Midsummer's Eve by myriad farmhands and servants, complete with a maypole raising and a communal dance.[4] Having been watching the festivities from her upstairs window, Miss Julie, the aristocrat's daughter, decides to join in and insists on dancing with Jean, her father's valet. This impulsive act—Julie is emboldened by the absence of her father, who's visiting a nearby estate—sets in motion the main narrative, a sadomasochistic battle of the sexes and clash of classes in which the haughty but vulnerable young woman's brazen flirtations with the ambitious servant lead to her seduction and ultimate suicide. In the play, the dance episode has already happened when the action begins, and we learn of it only through Jean's verbal description to his fiancée Kristin, the estate's cook (and the drama's only other speaking part). By actually depicting the episode and the licentious atmosphere in which it occurs, Sjöberg gives us a better sense than Strindberg does of the extent to which Julie is titillated by the servants' revelry and how that titillation heightens her susceptibility to Jean's charisma. Reinforcing this a bit later is a scene, invented for the film, in which Julie witnesses a literal "roll in the hay" between a sexually adventurous servant named Viola (who also has her eye on Jean) and her father's stable hand (played, in only his second film role, by the twenty-one-year-old Max von Sydow). The carnal spectacle both fascinates and repels Julie, adding to the tumult of contradictory emotions she feels—an inner conflict that will be her undoing. And so it goes throughout, with Sjöberg intermittently enriching the central drama with inventive bits of external action.

Most important, though, Sjöberg's opening up of the play isn't limited to scenes contained within the film's "present-day" narrative. Occupying a generous portion of the running time are elaborate flashbacks that link the two main characters' past lives and present circumstances with a clarity and richness that Strindberg could only hint at with words. Moreover, these sequences, as critic David Thomson has noted, are integrated into the action with a "silky ease" and "strange, dreamlike resonance" rarely seen in movies.[5]

And that brings me to my main purpose here. In pondering the film, I became intrigued by the idea of analyzing one such flashback in detail, and thus illuminating, a little more precisely, just how Sjöberg managed the exceptional feat that is Miss Julie.

II

The flashback I've chosen has special significance not only because it's key to understanding Miss Julie's troubled psyche but also because of how effectively it advances one of the story's main themes: the decline of the aristocracy and the rising aspirations of the lower classes. The sequence occurs shortly after the off-screen coupling between the two principals, which comes at almost precisely the midpoint in the film, just as it does in the play. Julie, consumed by shame and unsure of what to do, tells Jean about her parents in an effort to explain, as much to herself as to her new lover, the origins of her neurosis. It's derived from the following speech in the original play:

You see my mother was a commoner, of quite humble birth. She was brought up with ideas about equality, freedom for women and all that. And she had a decided aversion to marriage. So when my father proposed to her, she replied that she would never become his wife, but that he could become her lover. My father told her that he had no desire to see the woman he loved enjoy less respect than himself. When she explained that the world's respect did not concern her, he agreed to her conditions. But now he was cut off from his social circle and confined to his domestic life, which could not satisfy him. And then? I came into the world, against my mother's wish as far as I could gather.[6]

Sjöberg fleshes out this rather sketchy account with a quartet of brief dramatic scenes depicting the Count's announcement of his relationship with Julie's mother; the result of the scandal it causes; his troubles with his lover, which begin with their disagreement over having children; and his severe disappointment that the child they do have turns out to be a girl.

Particularly masterful is the way the director introduces this flashback sequence. Jean and Julie have just hatched a half-baked scheme to run away together, with the ultimate aim of opening a hotel in Switzerland, and Jean goes outside to instruct the stable hand to fetch a carriage. Before he reenters the manor house, however, he hesitates for an anxious moment as though realizing the idiocy of the plan. It's been clear from early on that Jean's great inner struggle has been between his ambition and his lingering fear that he will never escape being a servant; that's the conflict asserting itself here. When he does go back inside, his face awash in worry (fig. 2), he finds Julie seated in the drawing room, freely imbibing a bottle of wine. A high-angle wide shot (fig. 3) reveals their spatial relationship. Above the fireplace, looming between them, is a portrait of Julie's deceased mother, called Berta in the film; just to the right of Jean's shoulder, barely edging into the frame, is a large vertical mirror. Julie commands Jean to approach her. As he dutifully complies, Sjöberg cuts to a reverse over-the-shoulder shot with Julie in the foreground and Jean standing before her (fig. 4). Refilling her glass—a large beer stein, actually—over Jean's objections, she proposes to tell him her "life story," something he had done for her during the film's first half (a story also dramatized in a series of flashbacks). In another reverse shot, shooting over Jean's left shoulder (fig. 5), Julie begins the speech quoted above. She turns her gaze to screen right, toward Berta's portrait; as she does so, the camera tracks to the right so that, by the end of the shot, we're looking over Jean's right shoulder instead of his left (fig. 6). The movements of both her head and the camera lend special emphasis to what we'll see next.

Fig. 2: Jean, suddenly worried, enters the house.

Fig. 3: Julie, the portrait of her mother, and Jean.

Fig. 4: Julie begins to reminisce.

Fig. 5: A reverse shot as the reminiscence continues.

Fig. 6: With the camera tracking to the right,  Julie's gaze turns toward her mother's portrait.

Though it isn't immediately apparent, the transition to the flashback has begun. As we expect, the next shot is a closeup of Berta's portrait, presumably from Julie's point of view (fig. 7); her speech continues off screen. The camera moves in closer to the portrait, and Julie's voice gives way to a man's laughter. The camera then dollies backward, arcing away from the portrait, and Julie's father, known as the Count, is revealed as the source of the laughter. He's proudly showing off this newly painted picture of Berta (fig. 8), which is leaning against the fireplace instead of hanging above it. Thus, with that "silky ease" of which Thomson writes, Sjöberg has just carried us into the past. The two dolly movements within a single shot—first toward the portrait, which implies a heightening of Julie's concentration as she summons her memories, and then back away from it, which initiates the shift to the visual enactment of her verbal narrative—are key here, the transition further indicated by the replacement of voices on the soundtrack.

The friends attending the Count's presentation are revealed in the next shot (fig. 9); they're mostly fellow aristocrats, from the look of them. As the Count steps into their midst, he speaks, with great self-satisfaction, of his unconventional arrangement with his new mistress—that is, agreeing to her insistence that they remain unmarried—while his friends regard him with grim disapproval. Walking to the window, the Count assures them that their "doubts will vanish" once Berta has come to live with him, predicting that they will all "come rushing from beyond the lake in a great flurry of boats and horses and carriages," eager to meet her (fig. 10).

Fig. 7: Berta's portrait, apparently from Julie's POV.

Fig. 8: The camera dollies away from the portrait to reveal the Count (Anders Henrikson). Thus the flashback begins.

Fig 9: The Count among his disapproving friends.

Fig. 10: The Count confidently predicts his friends' acceptance. They don't seem so sure.

But, of course, the Count's rosy prediction doesn't come true; his "social circle," as Julie notes in the original play, abandons him. This is dramatized in the flashback's next scene, which begins with another close shot of Berta's portrait, just as in figure 7. As the camera pulls away from the painting (now mounted above the fireplace) and tilts downward, we see Berta's jacket, hat, and riding crop (her garb in the portrait) arranged on a chair (fig. 11). Apparently some time has passed, and the Count's mistress is now in residence. And, sure enough, in the wide shot that follows, we see Berta, seated, and the Count, who's standing. A serving table between them is set with glasses and champagne, but the expected guests have obviously not arrived (fig. 12). The Count turns impatiently to the window, and in the next shot the camera peers at him from outside (fig. 13). Two intercut POV shots—wide views of the main entryway, devoid of arriving visitors, and of the nearby lake, where a single empty boat is moored—confirm that the Count and Berta have indeed been ostracized (figs. 14 and 15). The Count shows his displeasure by closing the curtains, angrily declaring that he will shun his friends' society if they shun him. He won't welcome them back, he says, until they come begging for Berta's forgiveness. It's then revealed that one friend is present, a man named Robert, whom the Count brings from the corner to the center of the room (fig. 16). After noting Robert's humble origins and praising his "modern" outlook, the Count speaks of "the son" that he and Berta shall have one day. Berta objects; a child is not something she'd signed up for. In one of the film's many beautifully composed shots in depth, she leaves the room in a huff, framed by the Count and Robert (fig. 17). Fade to black.

Fig. 11: The downward-tilting camera reveals Berta's jacket, hat, and riding crop arrayed on a chair below her portrait.

Fig. 12: Berta (Lissi Alandh) and the Count await guests who won't be arriving.

Fig. 13: At the window, the Count looks for any sign of visitors. Two POV shots (figs. 14 and 15 below) confirm their absence.

Fig. 14.

Fig. 15.

Fig. 16: The Count draws Robert (Åke Fridell) into the scene.

Fig. 17: Incensed to learn that the Count wants a son, Berta exits the room.

Fade in. The flashback's third scene begins with a doctor informing the Count that Berta is pregnant (fig. 18). Overjoyed (especially by the doctor's assurance that Berta is "extremely" happy), the Count rushes into her bedroom and finds her collapsed on the floor; beside her is an empty vial, which he picks up and sniffs (fig. 19). Believing she has poisoned herself, he bolts to the window and calls frantically to the departing doctor: "She's dead! She's dead!" It turns out, however, that Berta was faking her suicide just to torment the Count, presumably for impregnating her. Hugely relieved that she's alive, he attempts to kiss her bared ankle, but she recoils contemptuously. "He who laughs last laughs best," she hisses (fig. 20). A tight closeup of the Count, the relief on his face giving way to troubled puzzlement, dissolves into the first shot of the flashback's fourth and final scene (figs. 21–22). 

Fig. 18: The doctor (Åke Claesson) confirms Berta's pregnancy.

Fig. 19: Berta's apparent suicide.

Fig. 20: Berta's contempt.

Fig. 21: The Count's reaction.

Fig. 22: A dissolve leads to the next scene.

With the completion of the dissolve, Berta's "last laugh" has become literal. We see a group of servants huddled in the drawing room outside a closed door (fig. 23). It's nighttime. Berta's muffled laughter can be heard, and the servants listen intently, noticeably disconcerted. Cut to a medium closeup of Berta in bed, cackling maliciously. She tells the servant who holds her newborn baby to show the Count "his son" (fig. 24). The Count's unhappy reaction makes clear that the "son" is in fact a daughter (fig. 25). With Berta's laughter ringing in his ears, the Count leaves the birth room and irritably dismisses the servants waiting in the drawing room, a couple of whom reveal their amusement when his back is turned (fig. 26). The Count pours himself a flute of champagne and turns his gaze upward toward one of the walls (fig. 27).

Fig. 23: Servants wait anxiously outside the birth room as Berta's laughter is heard.

Fig. 24: Berta has the last laugh.

Fig. 25: The Count beholds his newborn daughter.

Fig. 26: When he's not looking, two servants register their amusement at the Count's distress.

Fig. 27: After dismissing the servants, the Count turns his gaze to the wall.

We next see, from the Count's point of view and in quick succession, closeups of four portraits on the wall (figs. 28–31). If we've been watching closely, we'll have noticed these paintings in previous scenes. They are all from earlier periods and—I'm guessing here—either likenesses of the Count's forebears or portraits of Swedish and/or European nobility.[7] The first image (fig. 26) is more loosely composed than the others—that is, the picture frame is visible—and only one portrait (fig. 28) is of a woman (the Count's mother, perhaps?). Each successive image is more tightly framed than its predecessor, suggesting a mounting intensity in the Count's emotions. Seeing this little montage, we can easily imagine what the Count is thinking: that the birth of a daughter likely means the end of his family name. The subjects of the portraits all seem to be looking back at him, and in his mind, I'll wager, they're rebuking him.

Fig. 28.

Fig. 29.

Fig. 30.

Fig. 31.

A fifth shot of a portrait then appears, but it's more loosely composed than the others, not so close up, with wall space visible around both sides of the picture frame (fig. 32); in this way it's similar to the first shot in the montage (see fig. 28). The lighting also appears brighter than in the scene we've just witnessed. The camera tilts downward to that large mirror we glimpsed earlier (see fig. 3), and Jean's image is revealed, looking up at the picture and smiling rather smugly (fig. 33). He's clearly regained his confidence. Again, Sjöberg has shifted from one time period to another: we're now back in the film's present. The camera follows Jean as he moves to the left, pulls up a chair in front of Julie, and casually straddles it; she is still drinking wine (fig. 34). Cut to a medium closeup of her, weary and distressed (fig. 35). Her words—"Thus I came into this world against my mother's wishes"—come directly, of course, from the character's speech in the original play.

Fig. 32: With a cut to this more loosely composed image of a framed portrait, the camera begins to tilt downward.

Fig. 33: The downward tilt reveals Jean's image in the mirror. The flashback has ended; we've returned to the present.

Fig. 34: As the camera follows him, Jean steps away from the mirror and straddles a chair.

Fig. 35: Julie ponders her bitter memories.

Within seconds, the film will introduce a new flashback, as Julie continues her narrative with painful recollections of her childhood. I'll have a few words to say about that transition in a moment, but for now, I want to explore some important features of the flashback I've just described.

III

Though only five minutes long, the sequence is so richly textured that I could probably come up with at least a dozen aspects of it to examine. But I'll keep this to a manageable length and focus on four. That should be enough to convey a sense of the very high artistry at work both in this sequence and, by extension, in the film as a whole.

1. Going Beyond Strindberg. Above I used the word "sketchy" to describe the original speech from Strindberg that forms the basis of this flashback. In fact, throughout the play, virtually all of Julie's descriptions of her parents and their relationship to her and to each other can be called "sketchy." Strindberg's Julie tells us a lot about the traumas her parents inflicted on her; yet, they remain maddeningly abstract figures. The play's most famous symbol—a pair of riding boots belonging to the Count, waiting to be shined by Jean—stays in plain view on stage as a constant reminder to the audience of the aristocrat's presence, but he's never actually seen. When he returns to the estate at the play's end, he announces his arrival by ringing a bell and talking to Jean through a speaking tube. His voice is unheard; the audience only hears Jean's responses to it. And, of course, all we know of the mother is what Julie says about her, mostly in dry, matter-of-fact terms. Sjöberg not only shows us these characters, but he also takes pains to make them memorable. Lissi Alandh as Berta is not given many lines to say, either in this sequence or elsewhere, but she speaks volumes with her piercing eyes and steely demeanor. She also exudes an earthy, feline eroticism that makes the Count's attraction to her plausible despite her commoner status and her none-too-subtle disdain for him.[8] Meanwhile, Anders Henrikson as the Count is by turns pompous and pitiable, even as he manages to maintain a small measure of dignity.

In inventing the dramatic situations portrayed in the flashback—the unveiling of Berta's portrait, the shunning of the Count by his friends at her welcoming party, Berta's faked suicide, and Julie's birth—Sjöberg gives concrete substance to Strindberg's notably vague language. Berta's portrait is a particularly effective device, not just in how it's used to lead us into the flashback and bridge the first and second scenes of the sequence, but also in how effectively it establishes her presence in scenes where she's otherwise absent. (Kudos to the anonymous employee of the studio's art department who created the picture.) Even more potent are the direct clashes between Berta and the Count—her contemptuous defiance played off against his slow-on-the-uptake credulity until finally, in the fourth scene, he senses the imminent collapse of everything he's ever known.

In short, this sequence exemplifies what I suggested above about the film's "opening up" of the play: it gives us a context that illuminates the central conflict in ways beyond anything Strindberg's approach, circumscribed by the limits of the stage, is able to convey.

2. Mixed Perspectives. Since this flashback involves the circumstances leading up to Miss Julie's birth, she's obviously basing her account on what she was told growing up, not on the direct experience that will inform her subsequent flashbacks, and it would seem that her father was the primary source for her reconstruction of these events.[9] He's the only character who appears in all four scenes of the sequence, and when POV shots are used, they're strictly from his perspective. Yet, the portrayal of him, to put it mildly, is not unreservedly sympathetic; this would indicate Berta's strong influence in shaping Julie's perception of the episodes, especially those moments that make the Count look foolish. Consider his smug certainty that his friends will accept his unconventional relationship with Berta and his impotent fury when they don't; this is followed by the surprising (to him) revelation that Berta doesn't want a child. He seems even more pathetically foolish when he falls for Berta's faked suicide attempt and when, at Julie's birth, we see the servants smirking at him behind his back. Julie may have gotten the gist of these episodes from her father, but the contemptuous tone that underlies them likely came from her mother. In the play there's a moment near the end when Julie says of her identity crisis: "I have no self. I have no thought I didn't get from my father, not an emotion I didn't get from my mother."[10] Sjöberg omitted these lines from the film, but I'm certain that he'd absorbed them when he fashioned his own interpretation of the character for the screenplay. This sequence, I think, bears that out.

3. Rising and Falling. That major theme I spoke of earlier—the decline of the aristocracy and the rising aspirations of the lower classes—is quickly evident here, starting with Julie's words about her mother's humble origins, which mark the transition into the flashback. The first scene of the sequence depicts the Count among his mostly highborn peers and their distaste for Berta's nonconformity. To them, no doubt, she represents a class of vulgar upstarts trying to unseat their betters, and damned if they're going to accommodate the love-besotted Count as he seeks to welcome such a person into their midst, especially if they refuse to get married. Scene two of the flashback not only dramatizes their shunning of him but also shows him falling back on the one "friend" he and Berta have left, Robert, who like Berta is a commoner with a "modern" sensibility.

Though he might easily be missed at first viewing, Robert is also present in the first scene of the flashback. Look back at figure 9; he's the one straddling a chair in the foreground of the shot. This brash posture sets him apart from the others, whose stiff body language is more appropriate to the setting. In subsequent flashbacks he emerges as an emblem of the ascendant bourgeoisie—and an utter scoundrel to boot.[11]

Scenes three and four of the flashback chart the decline in the Count's fortunes. Having already made clear her desire not to have children, Berta plays a cruel joke on the Count in scene three—her feigned suicide—after learning she's pregnant. Then comes the crowning irony in scene four: a daughter instead of a son. Without a male heir, the Count must face the prospect of his family line ending. And of course, it's poor Julie who will pay the psychological price for her parents' ill-starred union.

A small detail in the shots bracketing the flashback highlights Julie's dilemma as a product of two different classes: the wine in the beer stein. Earlier in the film, before the seduction, Julie had made a point of drinking beer, a show of rebellion against her paternal origins, whereas Jean drank a fine burgundy he'd stolen from the Count's cellar, which to him was a sign of his superior taste and lofty aspirations. Here, Julie's consumption of an aristocrat's drink from proletarian glassware symbolizes her confusion of identity—a problem that has beset her during her entire life, to be sure, but which has now been pushed to the forefront. The heavy, capacious stein she holds (so unlike the delicate champagne flute her father holds in the last scene of the flashback) and her continual refilling of it also point to her "fallen" state and her attendant wish to numb her feelings of shame. This refined and beautiful young woman now seems like little more than a common drunk, a sad creature indeed.

One last detail is especially worth noting: that smug expression on Jean's face as he's revealed in the mirror, gazing up at the portrait, his self-assurance restored. We infer that in listening to Julie while she bares her soul and exposes her father's own sense of decline, Jean believes he's gotten the upper hand and that the higher station to which he's long aspired, symbolized by the portrait, might in fact be attainable. Then, by straddling the chair—just as that parvenu Robert had done at the presentation of Berta's portrait—he flaunts his arrogance before Julie, who's now reached her most vulnerable state. As you fall, he appears to be thinking, so I rise.

4. Into the Past and Back Again. There's a lovely symmetry in the way Sjöberg uses the framed portraits—first of Berta, then of an unidentified aristocrat—to take us into and then out of the flashback. In the first instance, we see (a) Julie looking toward Berta's portrait, (b) a shot of the portrait from her perspective, and (c) in a dramatic dolly away from the portrait, an "objective" shot that reveals the Count in the midst of an event that occurred more than two decades earlier. The flashback ends in a similar way: a shot of a different portrait—we at first assume from the Count's POV—and then a camera movement (in this case, a downward tilt) that returns us to the present with an objective shot of Jean, revealed in the mirror. It's a kind of temporal/spatial blurring that in Sjöberg's hands seems perfectly natural. As Thomson puts it: "Why should the one frame not contain different times? Why do flashbacks have to be self-contained when in truth memory floods into every present moment?"[12]

The distraught heroine's flood of memory continues unabated as she launches into the next phase of her narrative (fig. 36, a continuation of the shot depicted in fig. 35). As I mentioned above, mere seconds pass before the next flashback is introduced. "Then I had to be raised," Julie continues. "I was to be an example that women were equal to men. I was dressed in boy's clothes." Without a cut, Sjöberg begins to pan to the right, past Jean, who's taking undisguised pleasure in Julie's distress (fig. 37), to that same mirror we had seen earlier (fig. 38). The camera holds for an instant on the mirror before the young Julie, dressed as a boy, steps hesitantly into view (fig. 39). We're in the past once more, with present-day Julie and her younger self actually occupying the same shot, if not the same frame.[13] Young Julie looks up and the camera tilts accordingly, revealing a portrait of her in girls' clothes above the mirror (fig. 40), hanging in the same spot as the aristocrat's portrait we saw earlier (see fig. 31). It's another of Sjöberg's masterful little symmetries: the downward tilt away from the aristocrat's portrait that revealed Jean's reflection in the mirror just one shot earlier is now echoed by the upward tilt away from young Julie's reflection to the portrait of herself.[14] Such meticulous attention to the expressive possibilities of cinematic form is not something much in evidence in movies anymore.

Fig. 36: Distraught, Julie continues her story. The camera starts to pan to the right.

Fig. 37: The camera pans past Jean, who's amused by Julie's confessions.

Fig. 38: The pan stops at the mirror.

Fig. 39: The young Julie (Inger Norberg), dressed in boys' clothes, appears in the mirror.

Fig. 40: As the camera tilts upward following Julie's gaze, we see a portrait of her in girls' clothes.

The new flashback will go on to depict Julie's upbringing and the continuing tug of war between her parents, not only over the manner of her rearing but also over the management of the estate. It's tempting to continue with an exploration of that sequence—and the ones that follow it—just as I could easily go back to the first half of the film and do similar analyses of the flashbacks shown from Jean's perspective that depict his impoverished early childhood and his initial attraction to the young Julie. But that would be stretching things to monograph proportions. Suffice to say that I hope this essay gives a sufficient sense of those uniquely cinematic qualities—the careful orchestration of shots and camera movements, the attention to small but telling visual details, and especially the nearly seamless linkages between past and present—that help place Miss Julie among the ranks of those works every serious movie lover should see.

NOTES
[1] I use the qualifying phrase "at the moment" because my preferences tend to fluctuate pretty freely over time. It may be that Miss Julie is so fresh in my mind that it overwhelms my memories and perceptions of other candidates, such as the Olivier and Hawks films I mention. I don't include Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, an unquestioned all-time favorite, because it's such a special case—a film that weaves together parts of five Shakespeare plays (but mainly Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2) into something unique, if not altogether new, wherein the secondary character Sir John Falstaff becomes the protagonist. That film is truly in a class by itself.
[2] Like his younger compatriot Ingmar Bergman, Sjöberg was among the leading directors associated with the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where, according to his Wikipedia entry, "he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions." One of them was Miss Julie, which he directed in 1949 just before undertaking his film version.
[3] I should acknowledge that I've only read the play. I've never seen a live performance of it, and I'm sure a well-mounted production, with good actors, would be a powerful experience, especially if performed in an intimate space as Strindberg insisted it be. The two English-language film versions I've seen—by Mike Figgis (1999), with Saffron Burrows and Peter Mullan, and Liv Ullmann (2014), with Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell—can't, in my opinion, hold a candle to the Sjöberg version. The Figgis film is closest to the original Strindberg, though it does take advantage of the R rating to offer a fairly explicit sex scene. Oddly, given her Scandinavian heritage, Ullmann takes more liberties with the text, relocating the story to Ireland and enlarging the role of the cook, called Kathleen in this version and played by the estimable Samantha Morton. Ullmann also, perhaps not surprisingly, tones down some of Strindberg's infamous anti-feminism.
[4] While these festivities are mentioned early in the play, they aren't dramatized until the halfway mark, when a handful of servants invade the kitchen to perform a bawdy, pantomimed "ballet." The main characters are all offstage at this point; in fact, in both the play and Sjöberg's film, this is when Julie succumbs to Jean's advances.
[5] David Thomson, "Have You Seen . . . ?" A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 560.
[6] August Strindberg, Miss Julie, tr. Michael Myer, with commentary and notes by David Thomas and Jo Taylor (London: Methuen Drama, 2006), 27–28.
[7] I invite anyone with greater knowledge of the relevant history than I possess to identify the subjects of these portraits. I'm curious to know whether they are in fact actual figures from the past.
[8] More than a decade later, Ingmar Bergman would put Alandh's eroticism to good use in The Silence. In that film's notorious (for 1963) scene in which Gunnel Lindblom's Anna witnesses a couple having sex in a darkened variety hall, Alandh (uncredited) plays the woman engaged in said act.
[9] Of this and other flashbacks in the film, I make the assumption that they're tales filtered through the consciousness of the tellers and are not strictly "objective" renderings of some past reality. Overall, I think, the way the film presents them supports this reading. Each flashback—and this one is no exception—is introduced by the character, whether Julie or Jean, telling the story, and usually the character's voice-over narration is heard, at least for a portion of the sequence. This raises the question of how "reliable" the narrators are. Despite her hauteur, Julie is the more guileless of the two characters, and I believe her revelations are honest, however colored they might be by her troubled emotional state. Jean's case is more problematic. After he and Julie have sex, he claims that some of what he told her earlier about his childhood infatuation with her was "just talk"—that is, a seduction technique. Instead of idealizing her, he says, "I had the same nasty thoughts all boys have." Jean by his own admission, then, is an unreliable narrator—hardly inconsistent with the conniving and manipulative nature he displays elsewhere in the film, especially during its second half.
[10] Strindberg, Miss Julie, 44.
[11] As we'll learn from Miss Julie at a later point, Robert betrayed both the Count and Berta. He was Berta's secret lover and then stole money she had entrusted to him.
[12] Thomson, "Have You Seen," 560.
[13] Later in Julie's recollections, we do see young Julie and present-day Julie in the same frame. When Julie describes how her mother took charge of her after her father attempted suicide, there's a shot of Berta lifting her daughter into her arms and walking behind the chair in which present-day Julie sits; as Berta crosses out of the frame, we see her in the reverse shot walking behind Jean, who's listening to Julie's story. This suggests that Julie's thoughts have been transferred to Jean—an ingenious depiction of how, as we hear someone tell a story, we absorb their words and visualize their narrative in our own minds. In a different movie—a romantic comedy, say—such mise-en-scène might indicate a positive bond between two people. In Miss Julie, however, it's the cruel bond between the sadist and the masochist.
[14] The visual contrast between the bewildered Julie in boys' garb and the portrait of her in girls' clothes aptly illustrates, like so much else in the film, the old axiom "Show, don't tell." Near the end of the play, Julie speaks despairingly of being "half woman and half man" (44). Sjöberg omitted this reference because he didn't need it; he'd already captured the idea through such vivid and economical filmic devices as this one.