August Strindberg’s one-act play MISS JULIE is one of the most famous anti-feminist pamphlets of the nineteenth century, but at the same time one of most sought after female roles in theater. Liv Ullmann, star of Ingmar Bergman’s films and herself a successful film and theater director, has adapted the piece in English for an international audience with Jessica Chastain as the aristocratic, half-suicidal, half-man-hating Miss Julie, Colin Farrell as the servant John and Samantha Morton as the cook Kathleen. Ullmann’s film stays close to the theater piece, but she relocates the play’s three protagonists to a country estate in Ireland. Miss Julie is bored. She humiliates and seduces her father’s upwardly striving valet. She orders him to kiss her shoe. The seduction is depicted as class warfare and Miss Julie thinks she is in control. Later the balance of power shifts. Now John humiliates the desperate young woman as she kisses his boot. The sadomasochist power games are presented as a completely serious expression of rule or dominance. Strindberg described Miss Julie as a “half-woman” and “man-hater” as “a weak and degenerate”. MISS JULIE is the femme fatale of a revenge fantasy of an aggrieved masculinity. Strindberg’s piece wants to obliterate what Julie represents. Ullmann’s version clearly depicts a dark and fierce battle of the sexes.

Tom Dorow