BEFORE: Well, with Jessica Chastain appearing in yesterday's film, that creates another conundrum, do I drop this film in here, when it seems like it might fit better in a February romance chain? The problem there is, it's got just three main actors in it, and none of them appear in any other romance films currently on my list - so the film is something of an orphan right now. Sure, February and the next romance chain is a long way off, and any number of films could make it to my list as possibles, so there COULD be linking opportunities to come, there just aren't any at the moment. OR, I burn it off here, and get rid of it, and this clears space next February for films that DO share actors with other films on the list. It's always a tough call.
Screw it, the motto for this year is, if given the choice between watching it and not watching it, I should go with "watching it". Even if that forces the rescheduling of something else, watching it is always the better choice to make, even if that means reordering or reprioritizing the list. That worked for "A Quiet Place Part II", let's hope it works out again tonight. Jessica Chastain carries over from "The Eyes of Tammy Faye".
THE PLOT: Over the course of a midsummer night in 1890, an unsettled daughter of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy encourages her father's valet to seduce her.
AFTER: I don't know much about August Strindberg, but this is based on one of this plays. I think with just three characters and a closed setting (they never leave the mansion or the grounds) even if I didn't know this film was based on a play, I probably would have been able to tell that this film was based on a play. A little research on Wiki tells me he's considered the father of modern Swedish literature, and his plays are considered naturalistic dramas, building on Ibsen's "problem plays" while rejecting their structure. Particularly with "Miss Julie", he favored replacing plot with characterization - oh, great, that means a whole lot of nothing's going to happen in this movie, it will mostly be characters being introspective and complaining about their problems.
Strindberg had a childhood affected by poverty, emotional insecurity, neglect and religious fanaticism - which means if you met him, you probably wouldn't have a good time. His mother always resented her son's intelligence and she died when he was thirteen, so OK, some mommy issues there - the eternal quest for a maternal figure, probably. And soon after his mother's death, his father married the family's governess. Put a pin in that little fact, it may become important in a short bit...
But back to that naturalistic thing - when he started writing plays he believed they should reflect realistic speech, rather than stately verse. He worked as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library, but socialised with writers, painters and journalists - wisely, it seems he stayed away from puppeteers. But he also started seeing a married baroness, who was on her way to becoming a divorced actress at the Royal Theatre.
Strindberg went bankrupt, but then also wrote what is now called the first Swedish novel, then he started writing against hypocrisy, and self-identified as a socialist, a nihilist, but once the reviews started coming in, he got despondent and declared that "everything was shit" and said he was on his way to becoming an atheist. Divorce, drinking, depression, all the great things that affect an author's mental health, they all came his way.
Specifically, regarding his play "Miss Julie", which was produced in this "naturalism" style, Strindberg said at the time that his play was about Darwinism, which must have been a relatively new and trendy concept at the time. Which only shows that people back then didn't really understand Darwin's theory of evolution, which describes changes in the development of animal species over thousands of years, yet Strindberg said that his two lead characters were engaged in an evolutionary "life and death" battle, survival of the fittest. Umm, that's not how evolution works, it's not survival on a day-to-day, live or die, it's the theory that, over longer periods of time, mutations may occur, and if those mutations are helpful, then the mutated animals will tend to live and those that didn't mutate might be more likely to die. And it's not that, say, giraffe's necks will evolve to be longer and help them reach leaves on tall trees, it's that a few giraffes may be born with longer necks, and they'll be more likely to survive and pass that trait down to their descendants.
But what is really dying, slowly, in Strindberg's play "Miss Julie" is the aristocracy, as the daughter of the Baron, Julie is part of a dying breed. It's true that as the upper class had children and divided up their properties among their descendants, each generation seemed to get a little bit smaller piece of the inheritance, and that's one reason that aristocrats got phased out in Europe, except for in a few countries where the upper class was SO rich that dividing up the wealth with each generation didn't really matter. But the male servant character, John, is trying to rise upwards in rank, which isn't possible, though if he were to marry the daughter of the Baron, well, that could be a short-cut. Sex is the great equalizer here, two people from different classes could fall in love (or at least into bed) and they're not really thinking about class struggles at the moment. But then again, aren't they? If one person's from the upper class, doesn't that imply some kind of power or influence over a sexual partner from the lower class? I mean, either the rich person is paying the poorer person for sex, or they're using their rank to get the sex, and at least with a prostitute everybody gets what they want, since the prostitute provides a service and gets paid.
It's maybe a bit of a twist here that the female is the upper class character and the male is the servant - for centuries the rich and powerful men probably slept with whatever servant girl (or boy) or peasant girl (or boy) they wanted to, but you hardly ever hear a story about a queen or duchess lowering their standards just to get their freak on. Maybe the women were just better about keeping it quiet.
Miss Julie, however, is just the opposite - she demands what she wants, and she usually gets it. When the Baron is away, the sexual politics take over among those remaining in the house - Julie, John the butler and Kathleen the cook. John and Kathleen are clearly an item, not officially married but they've been working together for years and are so familiar with each other that they might as well be married. They're confidants and probably frequent sexual partners, but Miss Julie inserts herself into the situation, flirts with John and demands that he dance with her in the barn. John returns to the kitchen after a short dance, but Julie comes back and ups the ante by asking him to kiss her boot, and gets physical with him in other ways. After Kathleen retires to bed, John confesses that as a younger man, he would spy on Julie in her garden when she was a small girl, and he basically fell in love with her then, and has been working his way up to a job at the Baron's house, just to be closer to her. Yep, it's another love triangle, which has been a running theme around here for most of the week.
Long story short, they sleep together, and then the rest of the movie concerns how they should deal with this - should they just cover it up as if nothing took place? What does this mean for John's relationship with the cook? Should they run away and get married? And what would that mean if someone from the upper class married a servant? Maybe they could all run away before the Baron gets back, steal some of his money and open up a nice hotel somewhere, with Kathleen as the head cook. Nothing seems to make sense any more, everything has changed somehow since Julie and John did the nasty, and they can't change things back. There's symbolism in the earlier conundrum of Julie's dog, which has possibly been impregnated by the gameskeeper's dog, and Julie wants to abort its puppies, even though that could kill the dog. John is much like the gameskeeper's dog, he's had sex with an upper class bitch and now who knows, maybe Julie is also pregnant and will have to deal with the repercussions of that, get an abortion or go away for a while and have their child in secret.
A hundred different scenarios are envisioned, as they stay up all night, but none of them really work for John and Julie or produce anything close to a happy ending, and so a form of madness takes over in the morning hours. What else would you call it, when someone keeps working out the scenarios of their own life and can't find a happy path forward? Yes, Miss Julie's bird is symbolic, too, as she states that if she can't bring her bird with her when she runs away, then she'd rather see it dead than to be owned by anyone else. Yeah, this is not a happy movie. Once you factor in religion telling them that sex is a sin, plus the class struggle, plus the madness involved in staying up all night trying to solve the unsolvable puzzle that is their lives, life starts to seem quite hopeless. Geez, I think Ingmar Bergman learned a lot from Strindberg. This kind of calls to mind the problems seen in "Scenes from a Marriage" mixed with the madness of "Cries and Whispers".
Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "The Batman"), Samantha Morton (last seen in "In America"), Nora McMenamy
RATING: 4 out of 10 useless travel brochures
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