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List Price: $39.95 | | Label: Criterion Collection
Salesrank: 77154
Released: January 22, 2008 |
| Our Price: $19.00 |
| Used Price: $15.50 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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| Features:
Black & White Dolby DVD Full Screen NTSC Restored Subtitled | |
Editorial Review:
Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg s visually innovative, Cannes Grand Prix winning adaptation of August Strindberg s renowned 1888 play (censored upon its first release in the United States for its adult content) brings to scalding life the excoriating words of the stage s preeminent surveyor of all things rotten in the state of male-female relations. Miss Julie vividly depicts the battle of the sexes and classes that ensues when a wealthy businessman s daughter (Anita Bjork, in a fiercely emotional performance) falls for her father s bitter servant. Celebrated for its unique cinematic style, Sjöberg s film was an important turning point in Scandinavian cinema.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
New video essay by film historian Peter Cowie
Archival television interview with director Alf Sjöberg
A 2006 television documentary about the play Miss Julie and author August Strindberg
Theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by film scholars Peter Matthews and Birgitta Steene
Description of Miss Julie - Criterion Collection:
The caged finch that figures in Miss Julie's credit sequence sums up August Strindberg's tragic heroine all too well--she may be "jewel of the house", but she's also trapped. In Alf Sjöberg's expressionist adaptation, Anita Björk plays the high-born Julie to Ulf Palme's laborer's son Jean (with her feline features, Björk resembles a fair-haired Vivien Leigh). As much as the controlling aristocrat and social climbing valet detest each other, desire cannot be denied. Other impediments include the times (late-19th century Sweden), the ever-present staff (notably Max von Sydow's lusty groom), and Jean's upright fiancée (Märta Dorff). Unlike the thematically similar Lady Chatterly's Lover, their affair blooms and withers over the course of a single Midsummer's Eve, though Sjöberg's dissolves to dreams and memories lends their brief encounter an epic dimension (Jean has been smitten with Julie since childhood).
Like his protégé Ingmar Bergman, Sjöberg divided his time between stage and screen--the same as his theatrically trained leads. Though they remain fully clothed, suggestions of sado-masochism led American censors to ban the film in 1951. Shot by August's descendant, Göran Strindberg, the Cannes Grand Prize winner bears the otherworldly look of Bergman's The Magician combined with the hothouse atmosphere of Elia Kazan's A Streetcar named Desire. As Peter Cowie notes in the illuminating video essay, Strindberg's stormy marriage to a baroness inspired his masterpiece (not for nothing did he title his autobiography The Son of a Servant). In the booklet, Birgitta Steene puts the playwright's career in further perspective, while Peter Mathews does the honors for the director. The supplements conclude with a short Sjöberg interview from 1966, a moving made-for-TV documentary from 2006 (Miss Julie: 100 Years in the Limelight), and the US theatrical trailer. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Miss Julie - Criterion Collection Reviews:
A classic play brought to the screen 
2008-03-09 - This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film
Miss Julie is based on a well known 1888 play August Strindberg with the original Swedish title of Fröken Julie. The play has been adapted in to a movie over a dozen times.
The film won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It is about a aristocratic young woman living with her father who has broken up with her fiance and begins to be attracted to a servant in their mansion. They fall in love but societal norms prevent a marriage between common people and the upper class.
The special features are excellent as well. There is a television documentary about the play that inspired the film. It includes material about the 1999 US/British film adaptation. There is also a theatrical trailer, an archival interview with Alf Sjöberg, and a video essay by Peter Cowie.
This is a great film and makes me want to see the other versions. This one no doubt is the most well known.
the alter movie 
2008-03-04 - After several years i've got the movie( DVD ) that I was looking for to 'see' again.
Things we can do for mending a broken heart!
2005-11-06 - Strindberg seemed to anticipate the ontological loneliness, the boredom, the immature frivolity and the no sense of living around a impetuous young who having been rejected by her fiancée decides to flirt and eventually seduce her servant.
If you watch this film with the glasses of the actual society, you will find it something dated, but if you observe from another perspective, you will find interesting clues that may lead you to link the essence of the Existentialism (Think in Albert Camus The foreigner) and three outstanding films released after: Joseph Losey ` s The Servant, Bergman 's The silence and Bertolucci `s Last Tango based on Alberto Moravia.
It's a crime to arouse a passion only to satisfy a caprice.
An immaculate and definitive screen adaptation
2002-02-22 - Some films are so utterly faultless and brilliantly made that one is almost at a loss to find enough superlatives with which to praise them, and yet, at the same time keep it credible. MISS JULIE is one such film, and it seems entirely fitting that one of the greatest Swedish films ever made should be based on the work of one of Sweden's greatest writers. Every single aspect of this film is perfect; the black and white photography, the wonderful musical score by Dag Wiren, the acting from all the cast, but in particular from Anita Bjork who sets a standard in playing Miss Julie that could hardly be bettered. The play which provides the screenplay is of course devastating with the inexorable interplay between class and rank, and human desire and lust overlapping and intertwining, and too, the now almost forgotten concept of "duty" and "honour". If you like movies that make you think, eat away at your heart and memory long after you have seen them, then I cannot recommend MISS JULIE more highly. In the fifty years since it was made, its brilliance has not diminished one jot. A masterpiece and a film to truly treasure. My one regret with the VHS print is that although the sequence is intact, the lettering from the original credit titles has disappeared.
