Jenny gives William Olroyd's Lady Macbeth five stars
No, it’s nothing to do with Shakespeare, just the title
of a Russian story written by Nikolai Leskov in 1865 where the author wanted to
find a suitable name for a woman who defies convention and carries through some
increasingly terrible deeds.
Katherine (Florence Pugh) is a teenage bride who
has been part of a Buy One Get One Free deal between her impoverished family
and the bullying mine owner who purchases her for his weak and dislikeable son.
She is a virtual prisoner, forbidden to leave the house. So far, so familiar:
we’ve seen the poor downtrodden girl before, we know what to expect from the
wedding night, the windy walks on the moors with hair flying, and then the
inevitable transgressive sex with the handsome dark-skinned groom (Cosmo
Jarvis). Oh yes, we’ve seen Wuthering Heights. We know what happens to women
like Madame Bovary and Becky Sharp. It’s almost enough to make you want to
shout, ‘Don’t do it Katherine! Haven’t you read your Lady Chatterley?’
So the film is apparently a bodice ripper and
bodices do get ripped. It’s set in the English North East so there are
appropriately gritty accents. There’s period décor and costume. Many of the
scenes are visually startling with one vivid colour, for instance Katherine’s bright
turquoise dress, splashed into an otherwise monochrome frame.
But what’s this? The heroine wears a crinoline
cage and is laced hard into corsets but she also wears Boots Number 7 eyeliner.
There is an orange pet cat as restless as she, and it’s a Cornish Rex, a breed
not invented until 1950. She gets drunk in a thoroughly 21st century
teenager-y way, combining smirking insolence with a little light falling over. She
eats like every modern teenager I know – that is to say by holding her cutlery
in an extremely peculiar way. The film was shot on location at Lambton Castle
in Wearside and I could swear that the paint is straight out of the Farrow and
Ball catalogue, in fact it looks very like Mouse’s Back, the same exquisitely
tasteful colour that our ex-prime minister has chosen for the quaint little
old-but-new ‘shepherd’s hut’ where he will be pretending to write his memoirs.
William Oldroyd has spoken of getting inspiration
from the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi,
who has often painted women facing away from the viewer, sometimes looking out of a
window in an isolated landscape. The effect in the film (the production
designer is Jacqueline Abrahams) is of empty stone stairways and tall rooms
which have had all the air sucked out of them.
There are black and mixed race servants though no
one makes the slightest comment on this; there is class prejudice and sexism;
there is cruelty; there is sex; there is crime. But the director has not wasted
what he learnt in his earlier career in opera where themes of Grand Guignol revenge
can mix readily enough with farce. The moral corruption of the characters
emerges gradually as you begin to realize that the plot displays all the
conventions only to promptly upend them. This is no simpering heroine, but you
will have to see the film to discover how and why. The director has borrowed
from Haneke, Hardy, Andrea Arnold and most notably from Scandi Noir but has
created a style that seems unique, fresh and possibly a little reckless.
The screenplay, written by Alice Birch, has minimal
dialogue and indeed one of the characters becomes mute during the course of the
action. The cast are magnificent. There is almost no music. The sound designer,
Ben Baird, deserves every possible award for the way he evokes the unsettling voice
of the house: the austere squeak of shutters being opened, the clatter of feet
on wooden floors, the scrape of knives on plates and the echo of words spoken in
rooms stripped of comfort. Most amazingly of all, the film was shot in 24 days
and made for under £500,000. This is the film equivalent of a fiver. Well done
you guys, I look forward eagerly to your next project.
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