Miss Julie: Drama of the Sexes – Part 5

LIV ULLMANN

The emblematic moment in this sequence occurs when Julie, having just left Jean’s room and he Kathleen’s, walks past him without acknowledging his presence. She looks more like a woman who’s just left an operating table rather than a lover’s bed.

This is consistent with Liv Ullmann’s interpretation of the Julie-Jean relationship: an encounter between asexuals. Not only is Julie an Eve who has not bitten the apple, she’s never even seen the serpent, so uncomprehending is she of the sex act. There is no pathos in this bewilderment, only incredulity that a director could ask a 36-year old actress to play such ignorance—there’s nary a pubescent girl who doesn’t know that a place of magic lies between her legs.¹ Ullmann even has Julie hide, like a little girl, the undergarment with which she’d wiped her groin.

1 – Diametrically opposed to Ullmann’s characterization, Strindberg’s Julie is a woman aware of her sexuality. Two phrases she utters suffice to make this clear: ‘my womb cried out for your sperm’ (Ullmann’s translation) and ‘it [our fuck] could happen again’ (tellingly, Ullmann leaves this line out, for it contradicts her asexual take on Julie’s desire).

Julie then steps through the doorway and pauses, looking intently at Jean, now viewed in a tight close-up. She then approaches him from behind and, in mid-close-up, rests her head against his upper back. The scene is transcendent, because it rings so true to life: this is how a woman who has just been fucked, a woman who takes her share of responsibility for the incident itself and the disquiet surrounding it, would behave. ‘Say my name, say Julie. There are no barriers between us now’, she tells him. Julie’s embrace of Jean bodily acknowledges the momentousness of the fuck. ‘Yes’, her gesture seems to be saying, ‘my world has been turned upside down, but I too have changed’. This instant of recognition, regardless of its subsequent evolution, rings true. The sequence, at once so simple and so complex, so throw-away and so profound, will now launch the film towards its dénouement.

MIKE FIGGIS

This sequence deepens the contrast in mise-en-scène and direction of actors between Figgis and Ullmann. By over-egging the pudding in her rewriting of Strindberg, Ullmann ended up with an overwritten film script. Bad enough, but she made things worse by having her actors set their ‘emote’ button to maximum. Figgis did the exact opposite. He presented his actors with a stripped-down script and had them adopt an understated stance in their acting. The effect of the contrast between the meticulously low-key acting and Strindberg’s viciously high-strung text is stunning. Picking up from the previous sequence—‘Say my name. Say Julie. There are no barriers between us now’—Saffron Burrows’ seductive hush could be pillow talk, and it leaves no doubt about Julie and Jean’s complicity. Against this ground Jean’s violence now figures a dramatic contrast: ‘Not here. Not in this house.’ Having broken out of Julie’s embrace, he says this from the opposite end of the kitchen. ‘I respect this man.’ Beside himself, he then hurls the Count’s boots across the room. Peter Mullan’s acting is excellent, for it is multi-dimensional: he is overwhelmed by the turn of events, he is lucid about his situation, and he is determined to get a grip and move on. Julie watches him bewildered, yet there is dignity in her anxiety. At once partners in crime and outright antagonists, Julie’s and Jean’s ambivalence makes for a muscular drama between well-matched protagonists. Where Ullmann conducts a shouting match, Figgis orchestrates a war of the sexes. Refusing victimhood, his Julie and Jean never lose their pride and pluck.

In Figgis, dialogue emerges organically out of the dramatic situation and is seamlessly integrated with bodily expression. Take Jean’s ‘let’s go abroad’ speech: standing some distance from Julie, he insistently taps his pencil on his notebook. In that gesture, the ardour of optimism vies with the energy of desperation, the impetuosity of confidence with the debilitation of doubt. Filmed in close-ups in ‘mobile framing and dynamic staging’, this is naturalistic cinematic acting at its finest. Figgis now has Julie continue in her mode of stunned wonder, offering a striking contrast to Jeans’ naturalism. Indeed, when he finishes his speech, she simply says, ‘Say you love me’. The disjuncture between Jean and Julie is made evident at least as much in how they speak as in what they say. Dramatically, this works brilliantly. It is one more example of how Figgis’ direction of actors produces far more interesting results than Ullmann’s.

In the next section of the sequence, Julie and Jean first play a game of verbal chess, as it were, facing each other from either end of the long kitchen table. ‘Do you really think I can stay under this roof as your whore, with those people pointing their greasy fingers at me?’ In drawn-out undertones, deliberately and decisively, Julie makes her moves. Scooping up a pawn, she says ‘You bastard’ in response to Jean’s ‘It was a story for women’.

The duel then mutates from chess game to boxing match as, in response to Julie’s ‘Servant. Footman. Stand up when I speak to you’, Jean walks over to Julie, grabs her by the jaw and, squeezing her cheeks, says, ‘Servant’s slut. Footman’s whore. Why don’t you shut your mouth and fucking get out of here!’.

As Jean follows this uppercut with a left hook, Julie simply stops defending and lays herself open to further punches: ‘Hit me. Trample on me, I’m worthless… Why don’t you hit me?’ After pugilism’s artful violence and the cold calculation of chess, comes the gentler game of checkers. Jean: I could never make you love me. Julie: How can you be sure of that? Jean: But I could love you.

The sequence ends with a quick reprise of the three battle modes. Boxing-Julie: You are lower than a sewer rat. I loathe you, I loathe you, I loathe you. Chess-Jean: There is money in there. Take the money, and bring it down here. Checkers-Julie: Give me a glass of wine. It is this modulation from one mode to another, like the control of pacing by a long-distance runner, that keeps Figgis’ film spellbinding. On stage or screen Miss Julie, I’d be willing to bet, has never been better served.

The final section of the sequence—Julie, seated at the table in a throne-like armchair, Jean standing beside her as she drinks—confirms Figgis’ interpretation of Julie as not only sexually aware but also sexually experienced. Two moments make this clear. The first is this exchange: Jean: You hate men, don’t you? Julie: Yes, most of the time. But then sometimes when I’m weak… Oh, my God! Figgis’ Julie has the gift of lust. Given the circumstances of her life, it is not surprising that this gift finds expression in fantasies of violence: Jean: You hate me, don’t you? Julie: Utterly. I’d like to have you slaughtered.

The second occurs  in the following speech, when Julie casts a glance at Jean’s crotch when she delivers the line ‘And there, we enjoy each other’: ‘We escape to Lake Como where the sun always shines and the laurels are green at Christmas time and the oranges glow. And there, we enjoy each other. For ten days, eight days, however long it lasts. And then we die.’ In mythological terms, if Ullmann’s Julie is the Virgin Mary, not knowing what has befallen her till Gabriel flies in to inform her, Figgis’ Julie is Mary Magdalene, she of seven demons possessed, she in whom sin and sexuality coincide. If the interpretation works so well, it is largely because Saffron Burrows radiates both the sensuality of her own youth and the bridled sexuality of Julie. Again, in contrast to the lack of contradiction in Ullmann’s film, we see how, in Figgis’ dialectical approach, a stimulating turbulence arises when one current intersects with another of contrary flow.

MIKE FIGGIS

Where Ullmann never ventures beyond her narrow range of vocabulary and syntax, limited to the basic shots and cuts of elementary filmmaking, Figgis employs ‘mobile framing and dynamic staging within the frame’ to articulate space in all its dimensions, making his dramatic points through cinematography and editing, not just acting. For example, when Christine asks Jean, ‘What’s been going on?’, the camera obliquely lines up Christine standing in the foreground, Jean seated in the mid-ground, and the Count’s coat and hat on their stand in the background. The diagonal, by making it difficult to anticipate what will come next, creates dramatic tension. The camera then zooms into a medium shot of Jean as Christine crosses the frame. By such means Figgis manages the build-up and release of tension, until Jean finally confesses–wordlessly, via a look alone—that he did indeed fuck Julie. A musician, Figgis knows all about discord and resolution, and here he ‘stages’ the ‘melodic line’ (sex) while bringing in counterpoint (class) and harmony (the sex lives of the kitchen girls and of the Jean-Christine couple) and rhythm (optimizing the impact of each dramatic point). Dynamic and polyphonic, this is cinematography exploiting its potential and editing ‘transforming chance into destiny’.¹

1 – Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Montage my Fine Care’. In  Godard on Godard, tr. & ed. Tom Milne (NY: Da Capo Press, 1972) p. 39

LIV ULLMANN

Here, the filmmaking works fine. It’s Jessica Chastain’s Julie, as conceived by Liv Ullmann, that is problematic. Why? Because she lacks the minimum degree of freedom and responsibility to be a character one can believe in. Contrived, not organic; floating, not grounded, she is an insubstantial self that slips into one stylistic shell after another. That’s perfectly justified, you may think, since Strindberg himself has her say:

I have no self of my own. I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my mother, and this last idea—that everyone’s equal—I got from him, my fiancé. How can it be my own fault, then? Shift all the blame on to Jesus, as Kristin did?—No, I’m too proud for that, and too intelligent—thanks to my father’s teachings! Whose fault is it?—What’s it matter to us whose fault it is; I’m still the one who’ll have to bear the blame, suffer the consequences.¹

This stark speech makes clear the ambivalent nature of Julie’s character. On one hand, she has no thought, emotion or idea of her own; on the other, she has self enough to see that in society’s eyes she must ‘bear the blame, suffer the consequences’. What’s more, she has sufficient pride and intelligence to refuse the convenience of Christ as a scapegoat. Her self, indeed, is capable of assuming her freedom and responsibility.

1 – Strindberg, Miss Julie in Miss Julie and Other Plays, tr. Michael Robinson (Oxford World’s Classics, OUP, 1998) p. 108

Now let’s have look at just how the ‘insubstantial self’ of Ullmann’s Julie ‘slips into one stylistic shell after another’. The sequence begins with a bit of banter between ‘souls on the other side of despair’ (Julie speaks first): The sun’s rising. / And the trolls are dancing. / Yes, they’ve been dancing all night. It then morphs into the mad Ophelia motif that Ullmann introduced at the end of her prologue, with Julie in a trance, lost in a kaleidoscope of images that, one by one, she haltingly evokes:

Please come with me. I can’t go alone, not today. On Midsummer Day, the trains will be packed. I can’t—I can’t go alone in the midst of the black and gray on the train, people looking at me as if they know. / Oh, it’s so beautiful out there. The garden. I never showed you my little brook, did I? I know you’d love it, all my flowers.

The ‘mad Ophelia’ motif, while thematically justified,¹ is nevertheless ‘contrived’; it does not arise organically out of Julie’s character (in Ullmann she has none), but is simply a ‘stylistic shell’ into which the director asks the actress to slip (which, be it said in passing, Jessica Chastain does brilliantly).

1 – The following description of Ophelia’s situation suggests certain parallels with Julie’s circumstances: ‘Even in madness, Ophelia is patronized as the ‘pretty lady’ and ‘poor Ophelia’, ‘divided from herself and her fair judgement’. But Ophelia’s ‘self’ and ‘fair judgement’ were never more than a construction of femininity, qua submissive daughter and chaste lover, imposed upon her by the men in the play, Polonius, Laertes, Hamlet and now Claudius. In contrast, madness brings Ophelia briefly but spectacularly to life as a lover and folk-tale heroine. She has started to sing. Insane, Ophelia breaks from the subjection of a vehemently patriarchal society and makes public display, in her verses, of the body she has been taught to suppress. Her speech, once brief and submissive, is now dangerously lyrical, figural and promiscuous. No longer closeted and sewing, passively obedient to the men who owned and subjected her, she roams the palace grounds.’

Duncan Salkeld, Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, 1993) pp. 94-95

After the beheading of the bird, Julie discards the ‘mad Ophelia’ shell and slips into that of the Sylvia Plath of ‘Daddy’: in a fit of lucidity she yields to an outpouring of bile. These shifts from one mode of being to another, expressed in varying motifs, are not problematic; the problem lies rather in the fact that outside these borrowed shells, Ullmann’s Julie is an ‘insubstantial self’. As such, her suicide, rather than affirming her freedom and responsibility (she has none) becomes one more stylistic shell, as gratuitous as all the others. This is the fatal flaw in Ullmann’s Miss Julie, and it explains why her film falls so flat. We see, once more, that if a writer will not allow art go where it will, it will go nowhere.

MIKE FIGGIS

Where Ullmann’s Julie is flighty, floating, and contrived—one sometimes has the impression the actress is trying out different monologues in preparation for an audition—Figgis’ Julie is an organically constructed character, self-assured and purposeful. Her expression is grave as, dressed in the solemnity of liturgical purple, she enters the kitchen. Once again, Saffron Burrows is outstanding in rendering Julie’s shifting states, all arising from the character’s clearly delineated individuality. The first segment is business-like, the dialogue crisp and forthright: In less than twenty words it’s established that Christine does not suspect anything, that Julie’s got the money and Jean can count it, and that the two of them will be leaving together. Despite the cursory dialogue, there’s a poignancy in the way Julie and Jean address each other: at once intimate and alienated, conspiratorial and conflicted. The second segment sees Julie bending before the birdcage, greeting the bird and trying to catch it. As in the opening of the film, she calls the bird ‘sweetheart’. For her, it would seem, the creature is a valentine or flame: there is both complicity and alterity in her relation to it; it exists as much for her as for itself. This contrasts with Jessica Chastain’s Julie, for whom the bird is a transitional object, like a teddy bear, with very little ‘for itself’ or alterity.¹ Where Ullmann’s Julie is always and forever a child, Figgis’ is an adult, free and responsible.

1 – Recall her sitting on her bed, cradling the birdcage: she may as well have been sucking her thumb.

When, in the final segment of the sequence, Julie delivers her tirade, her stern indignation is persuasive, her anger and violence convincing, because we see that her ambivalence is no longer tenable: she must either uphold or abandon her ‘self’. Her rage is directed at Jean, to be sure, for he incarnates the fate that has forced her to assume the consequences of a decision she must now make, but it is also a form of bravado to boost her own courage: in choosing her self, she is choosing the radical isolation of all those who abandon the illusions that make life easier to bear. Julie’s tirade, then, is composed of both bravado and vengeance: it is at once inner- and outer-directed. The outburst of Ullmann’s Julie, in contrast, comes across as having more to do with the regulation of frustration than with a real relation to an other. As such, Ullmann’s Julie becomes a psychological ‘case’, whereas Figgis’ is a free woman with agency. Who has made the more feminist film?

The emblematic moment of this sequence comes when Julie, her rage just about spent, repeatedly hits Jean, who parries her punches. Exhausted, she leans into him; like boxers clinching, they embrace. For a moment she is suspended between kissing and crying, her face hardly an inch from his. Finally, she falls out of his arms and onto the floor. There’s something transcendent about this moment; there’s a truth to it that is touching, for it seems to be at once the inevitable outcome of everything that’s gone before and a reprieve of grace before the equally inevitable suicide that will seal the heroine’s fate. Needless to say, if the sequence works so well, it is largely because Saffron Burrows knows that Strindberg’s highwire viciousness works best when the actress holds back neither the physicality of her presence nor the alertness of her intelligence. Never making a misstep, her performance is a triumph.

MIKE FIGGIS

Again, Figgis’ 360° cinema immerses us in the drama; the camera takes us to the actors, we feel the cut and thrust of their speech and gestures. At least as much as the dialogue, the marriage of cinematography and mise-en-scène animates the drama. Where Ullmann’s compositions are static and frontal, recalling the stage, Figgis’ are cinematic, dynamic and varied in angle. His ‘mobile framing and dynamic staging within the frame’ constantly evokes ‘becoming’, the process of dramatic give-and-take, the rise and fall of tension. Ullmann, in contrast, films ‘finished’ images, the product of intellectual projection, bearing no tension. Where she favours the solidity of right angles in compositions that are hard-framed, self-contained and flat, he goes for the unpredictability of the oblique in fluid, open images with depth.¹ The style Figgis has invented, seemingly rough-and-ready but in fact highly choreographed, expresses both Strindberg’s naturalist impulse (‘rough and ready’) and his aspiration to tragedy (‘highly choreographed’).

1 – And, as we see in the images below, a rich play of directional forces.

As for the actors, I can only salute, once more, their performance. Unlike in Ullmann, where the actors take turns reciting their lines (appear-recite-disappear), in Figgis we have true ensemble acting. Indeed, the energy that circulates between the actors prompts each of them to find just the right timing and intensity, quality of listening and tone of speaking, to generate both emotional and intellectual truth. Finally, observe how astutely Figgis uses close-ups. They create, of course, a sense of intimacy, but also—particularly important in Miss Julie—they enable us to see, registered on a face, the shifts of power between the characters, the domination and subjugation so central in Strindberg.

LIV ULLMANN

To sentimentalize suicide is obscene. And yet, in the final sequence of her film, this is exactly what Liv Ullmann does.

Voluntary death is and always has been an extraordinary act that goes beyond the customary ordering of individual and social existence; this it has been even in circumstances where it has been socially accepted as a duty of honor or as an obligation of taste or even as an order in the name of an unwritten officer’s code. Not only that, but one’s basic self is submerged under a fabricated ego that is merely the result of formations and deformations brought about by the medium of society, a further potential source of distortion. The alienations and setbacks one experiences in one’s life could lead to legitimate reasons for choosing a voluntary death, regardless of whether those reasons can be communicated. Hence, the difficulty of trying to understand why someone commits suicide. One is trying to understand reasons expressed in a language that is individually subjective and not persuasive in the language of everyday life. Yet the individual situation, not the social situation, of each suicide’s argument is what must be understood in order to understand why anyone would choose to end their life.¹

All the verbiage and gesture that Ullmann has added to (or modified in) Strindberg’s dialogue and stage directions are aimed at heightening the pathos of Julie’s suicide. The attempt backfires, for any viewer with a modicum of intelligence understands that neither ‘the language of everyday life’ nor the ‘social situation’ have any purchase on the suicide’s reasons for killing herself. Yet Ullmann goes overboard in reiterating reasons, providing explanations, and dispensing sentimentality to such an extent that Julie’s suicide ceases to be an act of self-affirmation and becomes, unintentionally, a display of self-alienation.

1 – Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, tr. John D. Barlow (Indiana University Press, 1999) xiv-xv

In reclaiming Julie’s suicide for rational discourse Ullmann trivializes it.¹ Bad enough, but she makes it much worse by sentimentalizing it. Julie (dialogue added by Liv Ullmann):

I see silver and gold, and all the stars. Just like when I went to sleep as a child. I’m floating out of the window and up to the sky. Such freedom, surrounded by sparkling crystal. And the dark is no longer dark. The whole room is warm and safe like an open fire. It’s you. And I am close to the fire. How nice and warm it is. And it is so quiet and so light.

At the phrase, ‘and the dark’, Julie takes John’s hand in her hands and brings it to her cheek. Throughout the scene, the ‘andante con moto’ movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat major is heard on the soundtrack. Words, gesture, and music, then, all concur to convey an over-the-top sentimentality. ‘Voluntary death is and always has been an extraordinary act that goes beyond the customary ordering of individual and social existence’: Ullmann, instead of bearing witness to Julie’s radical loneliness as she prepares to kill herself, opts instead to smother it in mawkishness.

1 – The mode of art is mythopoetic, not, as Ullmann would have it, discursive.

The sequence continues with Ullmann having Chastain go full out, once again, with the ‘mad Ophelia’ motif. I contend that this—exploiting Ophelia for ‘poetic melancholy’—is something only a paint-by-numbers director would do. This is how Ullmann stages the scene: While Julie, sitting on the gravel bed of a stream, half-in half-out, tosses flowers into the water, she says in voice-over:

I’m sending you out into the world. Look. You’re like bright-colored stars. The water is your heaven. Do you know that, my flowers? Yes. Everything is so much bigger than the little pieces. Do you know that?

Ullmann has Julie, before she brings razor to wrist, wax philosophical: ‘Everything is so much bigger than the little pieces’. What does this have to do with Miss Julie? With Strindberg’s sex-and-class war? Nothing. It is a lame paraphrase of Blake’s ‘To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour’. From Ullmann’s perspective, this ending is apt, for it is consistent with the bons sentiments that prevail in her movie. From Strindberg’s perspective, it is asinine, a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey ending for a half-assed film, consistent with the rest of this travesty of his drama.

Feminist critics have written eloquently on Ophelia. Marlene Tronicke, for example, summarizing Elaine Showalter’s history of Ophelia’s representation,¹ writes:

Ophelia has evolved into an iconic figure who functions as an ideological blank canvas, mirroring a culture’s values and attitudes towards gender and the role of feminism. Ophelia embodies the whole trajectory of stereotypical female roles, from beautiful young lady and dutiful daughter to madwoman and drowned, innocent victim. In each case, she appears an emblem rather than a character in her own right.²

What cultural ‘values and attitudes towards gender and the role of feminism’ does Liv Ullmann paint onto the ‘ideological blank canvas’ of the ‘iconic figure’ of Ophelia? As one would expect from her anti-feminist interpretation of Julie, she makes Julie/Ophelia into an emblem of all that is retrograde in this regard. In contrast to Kenneth Branagh, for example, who in his Hamlet (1996) had Kate Winslet, as Marlene Tronicke points out, play Ophelia as a rebel, ‘channelling anger rather than distraction’, the look on her face suggesting ‘grave determination’,³ Liv Ullmann has Jessica Chastain inscribe Julie/Ophelia in the quaint clichés of childlike femininity and picturesque madness: clichés feminists deconstructed decades ago.

1 – Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the responsibilities of feminist criticism’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman & Patricia Parker (Routledge, 1985)

2 – Marlene Tronicke, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies that Matter (Routledge, 2018)

3 – Ibid.

Ullmann violates Strindberg, as pointed out earlier, in making Julie a sexless creature. Having suppressed her sexuality, Julie has no awareness of her body. The vector of sex as protest—essential if Julie is to be more than a mere victim—is thus denied her. And so Ullmann sends her to her death as a lamb1 to the slaughter: a suicide that might have been affirmative and subversive becomes surrender to a ‘natural order’, the mingling of female blood and flowing water. This echoes, in Hamlet, Gertrude’s vision of Ophelia’s drowning. Carol Thomas Neely:2

Gertrude narrates Ophelia’s death without interpretation, as a beautiful, ‘natural’, ritual of passage and purification, the mad body’s inevitable return to nature:

Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element.

Hamlet, IV vii 175-180

1 – lamb = innocent victim, not responsible creature

2 – Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Cornell University Press, 2004) 55-56

Marlene Tronicke:

Gertrude’s speech appears both strangely romanticized and detached. She aestheticizes the dying Ophelia. What could otherwise be imagined as agony looks like a peaceful, aesthetically beautiful surrender or indeed embracing of death.¹

Like Gertrude speaking of Ophelia, Ullmann aestheticizes Julie’s suicide. The reality of radical loneliness is replaced with the shallowness of sentimentality; the horror of a drawn-out agony is replaced with the prettiness of bons sentiments. The great Bergman actress thus proves herself a poor writer and director. Her Miss Julie is anti-cinematic, anti-Strindbergian, and—the antithesis of what she intended—anti-feminist.

1 – Marlene Tronicke, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies that Matter (Routledge, 2018)

MIKE FIGGIS

The final sequence of Figgis’ film is at once minimalist and majestic, the sound of silence vying with the bareness of poetry to create the ground against which suicide acquires a stark dignity. The formal coherence of the sequence bears the weight of Julie’s death; its style is conceived to convey the substance of the drama as it draws to a close. Displaying great cinematic intelligence, Figgis trades his ‘mobile framing and dynamic staging within the frame’ for a mise-en-scène and cinematography of static shots and extreme close-ups, abandoning, as it were, Bertolucci for Robert Bresson. If this sequence were to be written in prose, it would manifest the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of Joyce’s Dubliners. It begins with a close-up of Jean shaving, the silence punctuated by the dripping tap and the crisp scraping of blade across skin. The wiping and folding of the razor, the patting dry of the skin, all concur to give a stickiness to time. The stillness of the space, magnified in the mirror, creates a solemn setting for the impending death.

Then, as in a Francis Bacon portrait, Julie’s faces appears distorted in the mirror. Mike Figgis has Saffron Burrows speak in slow, measured tones: with enough gravel in her voice to make it grave, her soft speech is utterly natural. In the entire 7m10 of the sequence, there are only 133 words.¹ Virtually all communication is via the face. Visually and aurally, the sequence has a stark simplicity, and yet it conveys a density of emotion that is stunning.

1 – In this sequence, Figgis has 133 words in 7m10, which comes to 1 word every 3.25 seconds. Ullmann has 543 words in 13m45, which comes to 1 word every 1.5 seconds. Paradoxically, it is Figgis, not Ullmann, who has learned the lesson of Bergman’s Persona and The Silence.

Outside, we hear the sound of running water as Julie, razor in hand, opens the cuff of her sleeve. A piece for string quartet—stark and sombre, with uneasy depths beneath the surface placidity—comes up on the soundtrack. A ringing telephone rudely interrupts it: the Count is calling. Cut to a long shot of the kitchen, now suddenly bare of all the drama it witnessed before. Isolated, as if abandoned, Jean stands alone. He walks to the stained glass door and watches Julie at the well. The water from the tap runs clear across her wrist. Answering the phone, Jean speaks to the Count. We see Julie at the well, in long shot through the open stained-glass door. Out of the strings the musicians now draw a drone. Jean hangs up. As the strings launch into the film’s staccato theme, we cut to a close-up of clear water flowing from the tap. Gradually it begins to turn red. Cut to the kitchen girls fooling around as they enter to perform their morning chores. They do a quick curtsy as they pass Jean with his tray of coffee. Cut to a close-up of the tap, the water now running red. A butterfly—Julie’s soul—flies off. Cut back to the kitchen. The dog eating, the maid sweeping, Jean walking up the stairs. Cut to black. End credits.