DVD : Miss Julie

Rating: - Fabulously dramatic adaptation!
Miss Julie is a seriously excellent adaptation. Some might dislike its very stagey feel, but with the amount of utterly uninteresting plays I've seen lately, I could not have been more pleased! With only 3 proper characters (although we might add the silent presence of the Count), a set basically consisting of one room and some very intense dialogue, it's a very claustrophobic film.

Saffron Burrows is quite spectacular, carrying the emotions of Miss Julie magnificently. And Julie is a pretty emotionally unstable gal! The passion, the anger and the vulnerability all explode onto the screen (the bird-scene is just pitch perfect) and leave Mullan, to be frank, a little behind. Still, his performance is subtle, even if it does not quite match Burrows'.

But most importantly, it feels like theatre. Its fidelity to Strindberg pays off- the dialogue is remarkable and the tension between the two leads is almost unbearable. Like the best plays, we are constantly kept on a knife edge, not knowing which way the characters will go. The whole film is like a fencing match of wits, very evenly balanced, the servant and mistress matching each other blow for blow in a battle of gender, class and, well, sex. Then following the climatic split-screen sex scene, the tempo changes slightly and what was previously more of a game becomes charged with the consequences of the leads' change in relations.

Why would anyone possibly want to turn such a play into something more conventionally 'filmy'?

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Rating: - Unable to grasp your interest or sell its characters
Adapting anything to the screen is a risky business. But it is thanks to screen adaptations that we have The Godfather, Gone With The Wind, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and a hundred other great films. But we also have The Beach, Stephen King's It, Complicity and many, many more. So I will admit that taking Strindberg's play and adapting it to screen was a brave thing to do, and I respect Helen Cooper, the writer, and Mike Figgis, the director and producer, for doing so. But it, ultimately, fails.

It is Midsummer Night in the 1890s in Sweden. Two people on different sides of the class system - a Count's daughter and a footman - form a strange relationship. But can they get away with this, while the other servants seem to catch onto their wicked game? And will they be able to leave, and form a happy life on their own? As Waldorf and Statler from the Muppets put it, "the question is: who cares?"

Miss Julie is a film that borders on being a hundred things. It borders on being shocking; it borders on being interesting; it borders on being erotic; it borders on being creative in its portrayal of these characters; it borders on having interesting characters. It borders upon being good. But it is none of these things.

Firstly, the film is very stagy. I enjoy plays, but I go to the theatre to see them. I wanted to see a film. It seems to stick far too closely to the source material. Essentially, the entire film is set in a very tight area - practically one room. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we are involved enough with the characters to keep interested (Twelve Angry Men springs to mind). Here, any change of scenery at all would have been very welcome.

Secondly, Saffron Burrows was, I think, miscast in the role of the Count's daughter, I never felt at all emotionally involved with this character, and in scenes that we were supposed to feel emotionally challenged, I just felt quite awkward. Furthermore, I think that she delivered far too many of her lines in a way I did not think they should have been delivered.

But some of the dialogue is good, and Peter Mullan gives a reasonable performance, even if sometimes he too seems a little uncomfortable. And the split screen sex scene works quite well, and at least it looks different than the rest of the pretty dull stuff. The film is generally uninteresting, melodramatic and often very tedious.