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Details: Starring Saffron Burrows and Peter Mullan. Directed by Mike Figgis. Rated R for profanity and sexuality. 1 hour, 43 minutes.

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Review: "Miss Julie," one of those designated "classic" plays, is always being performed by one college drama department or another, for a very simple reason. There are usually about five times as many female theater majors as there are male. And "Miss Julie," though essentially a one-act play, offers a juicy leading-lady role, a decent male role, a marginal supporting female role (she sleeps through most of the action) and a number of run-through extras who at least get to be onstage for five minutes. Plus, it all takes place in one set: a cavernous 19th-century kitchen.

Personally, I loathe "Miss Julie." It's misogynistic and boring. Why director Mike Figgis ("Leaving Las Vegas") felt it would make a good movie is, as Yul Brynner would say, a puzzlement. At any rate, with neither critical nor commercial awards under its belt, "Miss Julie" is receiving a belated theatrical release. (It's probably just holding screen space for some Oscar contender after next week's nominations.)

August Strindberg's late-19th-century play was once considered so controversial that it was banned in the his native Sweden. Basically, it's a study of class warfare with a spicy dash of sexual politics. Miss Julie (Saffron Burrows) is a beautiful, impulsive and emotionally troubled aristocrat who, during some midsummer night's festival, decides to see how the other half, i.e., the servants, live. She initiates a doomed flirtation with Jean (Peter Mullan), her father's ambitious and manipulative valet, while his supposed fiancee, the cook (Maria Doyle Kennedy), sleeps in the background.

Mullan, who made such an impact in the little-seen "My Name Is Joe," has a suitably arrogant and scheming presence as the underling who will use any means necessary to further his ambitions. But the lovely Burrows is lamentably weak as the conflicted and neurotic Julie. She's a willowy lamb led too easily to the slaughter.

Figgis tries to tweak the action (or rather, the non-action) with suffocating close-ups and a self-conscious hand-held camera. But it just doesn't work. My suggestion: Wait until your stage-struck daughter is cast in some college production and suffer through Strindberg's polemics for a good reason.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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