Miss Julie (1951, Alf Sjöberg) (Patreon)

45/100

Read the play when I was in college a million years ago, couldn't get past the blatant misogyny (despite my very good prof's best efforts to contextualize it). Barely remember Mike Figgis' stagebound adaptation from 1999, but I gave that a C-minus, so apparently my low opinion of the text didn't change. Third time was not the charm, alas. Strindberg's thesis here amounts to "feminism kills," with a hefty side order of gender essentialism that might as well be contemporary anti-trans panic; it's just an ugly, vituperative work, and I recoil from it in much the same way that I do from most Solondz films. Sjöberg's efforts to make it cinematic, however, provide some interest. He transforms many of Julie and Jean's memory-based monologues into flashbacks (often with the dialogue continuing as voiceover), and showing in addition to telling makes a notable difference in some cases, e.g. Jean as a boy mistaking the Count's ornate outhouse for something less functional and having to make his escape through accumulated shit. More impressive still are the characters' related dreams, visualized by Sjöberg by placing the actor in close-up on one half of the frame and showing the dream out of focus in rear projection on the other half. Had he applied these techniques to almost anything by Ibsen, I'd likely have swooned, but at best they're a welcome distraction from Better a Superficially Servile Male Than an Aristocratic Ewww Female, What Say We Bag the Equality Nonsense and Put This Delusional Aspiring Ballbreaker in Her Place? And before a friend of mine complains that I'm imposing modern standards upon 19th-century mores, let me again note: Ibsen, Doll's House, it didn't have to be like this, Strindberg was a horror even for his own time.