Entertainment

Chastain and Colin Farrell film is very hit and Miss

Miss Julie was shot in Co Fermanagh and features an all-star cast – Colin Farrell, Jessica Chastain and Samantha Morton – but it’s a tedious two hours featuring a ‘so bad it’s funny’ northern accent from Farrell, writes Brian Campbell

Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain in Miss Julie
Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain in Miss Julie Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain in Miss Julie

AH, WHERE to start with Miss Julie? It seemed to have a lot going for it: a great cast, a story based on a well-known 19th century play and a good Irish angle in that it was shot on location in Fermanagh.

Quite why or how Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton signed up for this film – directed and adapted from the August Strindberg play by Liv Ullmann – is a mystery.

It’s a period drama revolving around a servant John (Farrell) who is seduced by his wealthy mistress Miss Julie (Chastain), while the cook and John’s apparent fiancée Kathleen (Morton) waits patiently in the wings.

Something has definitely been lost in this particular translation and it could be subtitled 'A Tale of Three Accents’; Chastain’s clipped Anglo-Irish aristocrat accent is good, the excellent Morton’s northern one is spot-on, while Farrell’s is terrible.

”She’s a-la-gant, Miss Jooooo-lie,” he says. Later on, he says “Ab-sa-lute-ly nat”.

Tellingly, he tells Kathleen in desperation that, “There are things I can’t control” – such as his nordie accent, presumably.

It’s more Jim McDonald in Coronation Street than Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon in In The Name of the Father.

But that aside, Miss Julie is a tedious film and it is a very long two hours.

While Strindberg’s 1888 play was set on the estate of a count in Sweden, with Jean and Christine as opposed to John and Kathleen, this version was shot on location at Castle Coole and Florence Court in Co Fermanagh.

We are told at the beginning that it is a midsummer’s night in Ireland in 1890, but as there is no reference to the location or what’s going on outside the stately home, you wonder why they bothered changing location at all.

There is a lot of clunky dialogue and many bizarre scenes: Miss Julie orders John to kiss her shoe; John kisses her and then runs off; John takes a knife to a canary…

The action is mainly set in the kitchen of the servant quarters with John and Miss Julie deep in conversation while her father – 'the baron’ – is away for the night. John bounces around frantically for two hours and it’s never clear why he’s so utterly agitated with the mistress of the house.

And when she makes her outlandish requests – asking John to take her out in a boat after he asks permission to go to his room – it’s reminiscent of Miranda Richardson’s Queenie character in Blackadder.

One thing leads to another and the pair end up in bed.

“I don’t know who I am,” says John. “And I don’t know who you are.” She’s Miss Julie.

He suggests they run away together and says he might one day be as rich as the baron.

“I may even buy him ite (out),” he says.

At 1 hour 50 minutes in, a bell rings to signal that the baron has arrived home. If only he’d forgot his keys and come back five minutes in, this would have been a manageable short and nothing would have gone on between John and Julie.

Sometimes you wonder how a film gets pitched, commissioned, made and released. Miss Julie was written by Strindberg as a naturalistic piece, but the dialogue here is very unnatural and unbelievable. As servant John might say, this is nat a mag-na-fa-sent film so it’s nat.

True to the original text, there’s no happy ending. Perhaps for the DVD release, they could lighten the mood by having the Ali G song Me Julie playing over the end credits.

:: Miss Julie opens at QFT Belfast today and runs until Wednesday September 23 (QueensFilmTheate.com).

MISS JULIE (12A, 130 mins)

Drama. Colin Farrell, Jessica Chastain, Samantha Morton, Nora McMenamy

Director: Liv Ullmann

TWO STARS