Miss Julie

United States, United Kingdom

1999

103 Min

Color

1.85:1

English

Currently 3.3/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

|

EXEC Willi Bär, Annie Stewart, Ernst Etchie Stroh

PROD Harriet Cruickshank, Mike Figgis

SCR Helen Cooper, August Strindberg

CAST Saffron Burrows, Peter Mullan, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Tam Dean Burn, Heathcote Williams, Eileen Walsh, Sue Maund, Joanna Page, Andrea Ollson

Midsummer night, 1894, in northern Sweden. The complex strictures of class bind a man and a woman. Miss Julie, the inexperienced but imperious daughter of the manor, deigns to dance at the servant’s party. She’s also drawn to Jean, a footman who has traveled, speaks well, and doesn’t kowtow. He is engaged to Christine, a servant, and while she sleeps, Jean and Miss Julie talk through the night in the kitchen. For part of the night it’s a power struggle, for part it’s the bearing of souls, and by dawn, they want to break the chains of class and leave Sweden together. When Christine wakes and goes off to church, Jean and Miss Julie have their own decisions to make. –IMDb

Director

Mike Figgis

Michael “Mike” Figgis (born 28 February 1948) is an English film director, writer, and composer.

Figgis’s early interest was in music and he played keyboards for Bryan Ferry’s first band. In 1983 he directed a theatre play, produced in Theatre Gerard-Philipe (Saint-Denis, Paris, France). This play performed with great success at Festival de Grenada and in Theater der Welt (Munich, Germany).

After working in theatre (he was a musician and performer in the experimental group People Show) he made his feature film debut with the low budget Stormy Monday in 1988. The film earned him attention as a director who could get interesting performances from established Hollywood actors. He initially made a splash in America in the 1990s with the gritty thriller Internal Affairs that helped to revive the career of Richard Gere. His next Hollywood feature Mr. Jones was misunderstood by the studio who attempted to market the downbeat story as a feelgood movie… read more

Michael “Mike” Figgis (born 28 February 1948) is an English film director, writer, and composer.

Figgis’s early interest was in music and he played keyboards for Bryan Ferry’s first band. In 1983 he directed a theatre play, produced in Theatre Gerard-Philipe (Saint-Denis, Paris, France). This play performed with great success at Festival de Grenada and in Theater der Welt (Munich, Germany).

After working in theatre (he was a musician and performer in the experimental group People Show) he made his feature film debut with the low budget Stormy Monday in 1988. The film earned him attention as a director who could get interesting performances from established Hollywood actors. He initially made a splash in America in the 1990s with the gritty thriller Internal Affairs that helped to revive the career of Richard Gere. His next Hollywood feature Mr. Jones was misunderstood by the studio who attempted to market the downbeat story as a feelgood movie resulting in a box office flop. Figgis poured his disenchantment with the film industry into Leaving Las Vegas, creating star turns for Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue which earned Figgis Academy Award nominations for Best Directing and Best Screenplay. His most ambitious film to date is the low budget film The Loss of Sexual Innocence, a loosely based autiobiographical movie of the director himself.

Forays into digital video technology led him to conceive of and direct Timecode, which took advantage of the technology to create an ensemble film shot simultaneously with four cameras all in one take and also presented simultaneously and uncut, dividing the screen into four quarters. Since then, his work output has almost exclusively been on the cutting edge of creative digital filmmaking, with the exception of star-laden Cold Creek Manor. He returned to the Timecode quad-screen approach for his section of Ten Minutes Older, but has also worked on documentary pieces including a segment of The Blues (called Red, White, and Blues) and a short piece on flamenco. His curiosity with the cinematic use of time has led him to cite Robert Enrico’s film version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as an influential film for him. Figgis has a well-documented love-hate relationship with the Hollywood system which leads him to often be an outspoken critic of the system while also despairing the lack of a better alternative, in his mind, at the moment. At an appearance at Camerimage in 2005, he expressed the view that filmmaking had become “boring and perhaps need[ed] to become even worse before anything better can emerge” successfully at least in reaction. –Wikipedia

read less