MISS JULIE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 722, 15 May 1953, Page 21

MISS JULIE

(International Films) "WHE full resources of the cinema are seldom. adequately exploited in a single film, yet when they are, in such a production as this adaptation of August Strindberg’s play, the barriers of langugge seem to be almost completely broken down. Miss Julie is a Swedish film, but its sub-titles are ‘hardly necessary because the ‘story is told in the language of the eye, The photography (by a coincidence in the hands of the playwright’s grandson, Goran Strindberg) is superlatively good, and the director, Alf Sjoberg, has made full use of visual symbolism to emphasise the moral of his story. : The opening scene shows Miss Julie (Anita Bjork), the daughter of a Swedish noble family, living on their country estate, looking down from her window at the midsummer night celebrations of farm workers and their girls as they dance around a maypole in the fields. A caged canary hangs in the window by her head. She goes to the dance when it continues in a hay-filled barn, and waltzes with her father’s coachman, Jean (played by Alf Palme). Julie appears as a high-spirited, spoilt girl who has just sent away her fiancé in a fit of pique, and who now. flirts with her father’s servant instead. But Jean, a man of aspiring vision coarsened by his life as a menial, reveals that he has secretly loved her since he was a boy. They wander through the moonlit fields among the revelling peasants, and he rows her on the river when his drunken companions pursue them. When they hide in his room he seduces her because the story of his childhood infatuation has weakened her resistance, while the dancers sing and drink boisterously in the kitchen on the other side of the door..In the morning they are both distracted. For a moment > she has thought she loves him, but row that he has triumphed he alternately ,abuses her and urges her to run away with him to start a hotel in Switzerland. She goes back to the house and there tells him the story of her own unhappy childhood, but at the instant when they are teady to leave the estate together her father, the count, returns with her fiancé. She cannot face a continuance of her old life and commits suicide. These incidents are presented with an adroit use of interlocking flashbacks to show the past lives of the two main characters, played out against the continual background of midsummer debauchery which underlines the sexual passion which is the motif of the drama. The eccentric life of the count and his half-crazy mistress is revealed in ‘the film’s longest flashback, and although there is a little too much melodrama here, the episode is neatly dovetailed into the few hours of the action of the main story. Jean’s role as a romantic lover is pointed out early in the film when he is Seen driving the count’s pony trap through the park, and shots of his own face are juxtaposed with those of the marble features of classical sculptures which are dotted along the driveway. The film achieves an effect of great cohesion and solidigy, and the potentialities of camera, sound-track and exterior setting are triumphantly mastered.