A Film Canon

If polymorphous perversity were a topography, it would take the form of the estate outlined in this extraordinary adaptation of Strindberg's play, against which the romance between Julie (Anita Björk), its mistress, and Jean (Ulf Palme), its head servant, takes place, over the course of a single Midsummer's holiday. This is largely the legacy of Julie's mother, Countess Berta (Lissi Alandh), who, upon being forced to marry her lover, Count Carl (Anders Henrikson), progressively undermines every institution that springs from it, raising Julie as a boy, forcing male servants to do the work of female servants (and vice versa), and at least offering the possibility of servant-master equality, if only to ultimately clarify its absence. As this might suggest, the result evokes the libidinal investment in feudalism, not merely in its satisfaction of latent sado-masochistic impulses, but in its ability to couch the abject (servants) within a protective, contemplative shell (aristocrats); that is, the scopophilic imperative, as evinced in Julie's fascination with Jean's recollection of the time that, as a child, he was forced to flee the "beautiful" outhouse through the lavatory. From this perspective, the increasingly threatening, intrusive presence of the carousing Midsummer servants takes on the character of a return of the repressed, nuancing Julie and Jean's increasingly disorienting explorations of each other, and embodied in Göran Strindberg's evocative cinematography, which transforms the camera into a centre of gravity - or, more accurately, a powerful magnet - such that masses of sexuality seem to be constantly attracted to or repelled from it, and grotesque bodies are constantly sliding down hay around it, all of which is poetically coupled with a pervasive sheen whose ostensible lyricism is little more than a distillation of beer, sweat and semen.