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Jessica Chastain says her character, Miss Julie, is ‘a woman who wants non-existence,’ which is unlike her traditional portrayal.

Almost nobody who films a classic play does the whole thing without cuts. It's less common to add a whole new scene to the heart of the piece, as Liv Ullmann does in her adaptation of August Strindberg's 1888 play, Miss Julie.

The long one-act drama portrays a lethal upstairs-downstairs liaison in a Swedish country manor on a midsummer night. Strindberg has the sexual tryst occurring offstage, but Ullmann follows the aristocratic title character and her servant lover into the bedroom and gives them several minutes of new dialogue.

"Strindberg didn't write what happens just before they make love, and after," Ullmann said in an interview after the film's TIFF premiere. "I wanted to show that."

In one particularly potent line, Ullmann has Julie (played by Jessica Chastain) say to John (Colin Farrell), "Do you ever feel that you're no one?" It may be the film's most intimate moment.

"That sentence is maybe mine, but that is what she feels, that is who she is," says Ullmann. "And it's not against what Strindberg did."

What Strindberg did has been changed and adapted by several playwrights in recent years, sometimes drastically. Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie resets the play to postwar Britain, and Yael Farber's Mies Julie – seen at Vancouver's The Cultch last April – adapts it to post-apartheid South Africa. Stephen Sachs revised the piece for a 1964 Mississippi setting in his Miss Julie: Freedom Summer (done by Canadian Stage and Vancouver's Playhouse Theatre in 2009), and Tara Beagan's Miss Julie: Sheh'man transferred it to a B.C. ranch, where Jonny was an indigenous man who had endured the residential school system. Toronto's Kick Theatre produced the piece in 2008.

One reason for all this rewriting may be a desire to deflect from the play's harsh sexual politics, which Strindberg lays bare in his polemical preface. Women, he writes, are "a stunted form of human being," and Miss Julie is typical of a degenerate type of "half-woman," who tries and fails to be as autonomous as a man – the natural "lord of creation [and] creator of culture."

"What Strindberg says in his introduction is horrible," Ullmann says. "I'm reading this as a woman." Her adaptation finds more vulnerability in John, more decision in Julie, and expansively humanizes the role of the cook Kathleen, described by Strindberg as a hypocritical "slave" that he only sketched in.

"It's not a production where there is this violence of the sexes," said Chastain, a two-time Oscar nominee who came to Toronto for the premiere at TIFF, "but perhaps it illuminates another part of Strindberg's writing.

"Liv said something to me at the beginning of rehearsal that really threw me for a loop. She said, 'What if Julie wants, from the beginning, what happens at the end? What if this night is about how she is going to get there?'"

The comment transformed Chastain's approach, she said, and you can see that right away on the screen. When she first appears, there's none of the flirtatious lightness many actresses begin with. "When you're playing a woman who wants non-existence at the beginning of the play, you're on a dark road," she said.

Chastain had wanted to do Miss Julie since performing a scene from the play while a student at Juilliard, and was eager to work with Ullmann. "But it was tough to stay in the character. I'm really different from Miss Julie."

Ullmann transferred the action to Northern Ireland, mainly, she says, because it would have been silly to shoot on location in Sweden with an Anglophone cast. But the cool Nordic lighting, leisurely pace and probing medium shots give the film a Scandinavian art-house feeling that may not surprise, given Ullmann's years as muse to Ingmar Bergman. Even the musical choices – contemplative chamber pieces by Schubert and Bach – recall some of Ullmann's great Bergman films.

She didn't see his 1985 theatre production of Miss Julie, which was reckoned a landmark staging at the time. Nor did she ever play the title role herself. Chastain said that she felt Ullmann was vicariously sharing the role with her, but the director disagreed.

"When the camera came on, I didn't tell her what she should think or what the scene was about," Ullmann said. "She's an incredible actor and I trusted in her creativity. If I have really great actors, I allow them to be what they feel is right in the moment."

Kathleen's role expanded partly because Ullmann knew that Samantha Morton could make so much more of the part than the dry, practical character that is often portrayed. Ullmann didn't write new dialogue for Morton, she said, but gave her more time on screen to react physically to the drama going on around her.

As for Farrell, Ullmann said "I don't know many actors who could play John the way Colin does. His brutality became so open and big, because you see the sweetness and the longing as well as the hatred. Male directors always make him so macho."

The film's finale is more definite and more gentle than the one Strindberg wrote. Ullmann said she was inspired by John Millais's 1852 painting of Shakespeare's Ophelia floating on the water with flowers, and by its implication that there can be something peaceful even in a tragic death.

The film arrives in European cinemas Friday , with North America release dates yet to be determined. Whatever the fate of this Miss Julie, we may see another collaboration between Ullmann and Chastain, who both said they would like to film Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, with each other.

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