Festival d’Avignon

Mademoiselle Julie is a naturalistic play written in 1888 by August Strindberg. It is set on Midsummer's Eve on the estate of a Count. The young woman of the title is drawn to a senior servant, a valet named Jean (Nicolas Bouchaud), who is particularly well-traveled, well-mannered and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Mademoiselle Julie's father's manor, where Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine (Bénédicte Cerutti), cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and Miss Julie talk. On this night the relationship between Miss Julie and Jean escalates rapidly to feelings of love and is subsequently consummated. Over the course of the play Miss Julie and Jean battle until Jean convinces her that the only way to escape her predicament is to commit suicide.

After long years spent in exile in Paris, Lyubov, a strange and elusive woman, returns to her ancestral estate, about to be sold to pay off the family’s debts. As the centre around which the play revolves, forever oscillating between tragedy and comedy, this maternal figure, this mater dolorosa, played by Isabelle Huppert, returns to a family unsettled by the future of the estate, and more largely, by that of this world she left behind. Modern society, with its social changes, is right around the corner, noisily announcing its arrival.