Product Description

Saffron Burrows (Deep Blue Sea) and Peter Mullan (Trainspotting) deliver riveting performances (Newsday) in this tale of desire, passion and betrayal that pits upper class against lower class in a 'superbly staged battle between the sexes (Detour). With a script basedon August Strindberg's famous play and written for the screen by Helen Cooper, Miss Julie director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) presents a taut and intimate story, holding you with the intensity of his vision and his mastery of nuance (Los Angeles Times) from beginning to end. On a late 19th-century estate, a celebration of wine and beer lets loose inhibitions and innerpassions. Jean (Mullan), the Count's footman, takes the advances of the Count's daughter (Burrows) too far with a scandalous encounter in the kitchen. And over one night, it becomes clear that these two lost souls desperately need each other in order to escape the confinesand trappingsof their lives. But can a servant support a noblewoman, who, without her father's money, is no more privileged than he?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54083 in DVD
• Brand: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Home Entertainment
• Released on: 2000-05-30
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Amazon.com
On Midsummer's Eve, in Northern Sweden, noblewoman Miss Julie stays home, perhaps due to the failure of her engagement to a callous man. Instead, she takes part in the servants' wild outdoor dances--but her eye is on her father's footman, John, who is engaged to the cook, Christine. As the exhausted Christine falls asleep in a chair, John and Miss Julie begin a struggle of power and sex in which their social roles are both a weapon and a weakness. Like most of Mike Figgis's films (Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs), Miss Julie is very pretty to look at and the actors (Saffron Burrows and Peter Mullan) are excellent. The movie is adapted from the August Strindberg play of the same name; the theatrical dialogue and speeches don't play all that well in film, but are well-executed, and Figgis finds ways to keep the movie visually engaged: Burrows's height (or Mullan's lack of it) is a visual metaphor for their class standings; at one point Miss Julie cries, and her tears clean a streak in the dust on her face, making her look both clownish and pitiful; the screen splits in two, showing two perspectives of the same scene for a brief time. When the servants return from their drunken revels, John and Miss Julie are forced to hide lest they start rumors, and the servants stagger around the kitchen, singing, grabbing each other, searching thirstily for more wine--the effect is eerie. A strong adaptation of a theater classic. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
August Strindberg's late-nineteenth-century play-ostensibly about the passion of a nobleman's beautiful daughter (Saffron Burrows) for a servant (Peter Mullan), but more focussed on the powerful class issues between them-gets a blunt and essentially wrongheaded treatment by director Mike Figgis ("Leaving Las Vegas," "The Loss of Sexual Innocence"). Most of the action takes place in the cavernous kitchen of a Swedish castle, and Figgis is to be commended for not opening up the play into a series of repressed arguments in the brambles (as a James Ivory film would do). It's been shot quickly (three weeks) by handheld cameras, and the jarring, eccentric angles give the film a woozy motion that breaks the actors' intensity. Burrows and Mullan do fine work with their wicked, taunting roles-it couldn't have been easy with cameras practically up their noses-but the movie has no momentum, and Figgis, whose best films are packed with sexual energy, barely captures a decent erotic charge between this warring couple. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
I was very disappointed by this movie (nothing against the seller; the DVD is perfect quality). I saw the play a few years ago and enjoyed it very much but this adaptation is not at all what I was expecting. A real shame.

This is a tough one to review!!!
Some movies baffle me.I want to like them,but something just won't let me embrace the entire work.MISS JULIE is one such film.While I found the actors outstanding in their performances, I was intensely aware that this was adapted from a play.It felt exactly like a play that maybe I would have enjoyed more sitting in a live theatre,able to sense the energy of other people.For me,some plays just simply do not adapt well to the screen.While I admired the unique camera work and Mike Figgis' attempt to film this work SOMETHING just did not work.Maybe in the hands of another director or opening up the film from that claustrophobic kitchen would make MISS JULIE more interesting to be viewed on a screen;but until that happens I feel that MISS JULIE needs to remain a play.
Also,some of the dialogue gets so low that it practically becomes inaudible.I was constantly rewinding in order not to miss anything.That's frustrating!

Well-acted film, but don't expect to enjoy it
Don't expect this film about one night of sexual relationship between a count's daughter and her footman to be a light-hearted French-style romp. It is, instead, a highly depressing film about a deeply self-destructive woman and a ruthless, heartless man. Throughout the film, each relentlessly attempts to dominate and ultimately destroy the other. True, there's some well-worded dialog about class and gender relations, that's highly radical for the 1880s, when I believe the original play was written. The strong overtones of sadism are probably original. Although I suspect the four-letter words and other explicit references were inserted in the modern film script.

But the characters-particularly Miss Julie-are so utterly irrational, that I couldn't help spending the film saying "Geez, guys, just quit drinking, get some sleep, and things will look better in the morning." At one point, when Miss Julie proposes a suicide pact, the footman replies, "I'd rather open a hotel."

No kidding.