THIS ISN’T ‘LADY SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH’
Stellar performances highlight mesmerizing film
She’d really like to get out of this damned spot. Not to mention that damned corset and monstrous hoop skirt. If you ask me, it’s the sadistic apparel that finally drives her over the edge.
There’s also the total isolation and the physical and psychological abuse, among other factors, that contribute to making Katherine the “Lady Macbeth” of her grim time and place — rural Northumberland, 1865 — where she has been sold into a loveless marriage to a bitter middle-aged man.
Katherine (Florence Pugh) is a bird in a not-so-gilded cage, imprisoned in an ugly manse, guarded and watched from dawn till dark, forbidden to go outside, an obedient adornment forced to endure all manner of humiliations from husband Alexander (Paul Hilton) and spiteful father-in-law Boris (Christopher Fairbank) alike.
“See that she stays awake,” Alex orders servant Anna (Naomi Ackie) after dinner, so the wife can accommodate the hubby’s kinky demands in their boudoir. His sweet talk there? “Stand up, stop smiling, take off your nightdress ...”
The not-so-blushing bride is less
terrified than bored by the mean males who rule her and the other slaves on their estate while constantly chastising her for not producing an heir, even though her impotent husband’s previous wife fared no better.
When a dam bursts at their mill, the men leave to oversee repairs. Katherine gets a respite to enjoy such blissful freedoms as discarding her one (and evidently only) blue dress, and the corset and hoops beneath it, to walk in a field on a sunny day and to savor an encounter with brash young farmhand Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis). Emboldened by her attentions, he soon forces his way into her bedroom and ...
Well, suffice to say, when the master cats are away, discipline among the mice goes to hell. But the keyholes in this place are wide and spies plentiful. More frenzied trysts with Sebastian ensue, as the prisoner rebels against her wardens. Once ignited, Katherine’s passion unleashes a force beyond her own or anybody else’s control.
In his stunning feature film debut, British opera/ theater director William Oldroyd fashions a superb piece of storytelling with a starkly nonverbal narrative. These folks rarely discuss or telegraph what they’re going to do before coldly doing it — in long takes and silences. This Lady Macbeth sleepwalks and hallucinates through her grubby castle without rubbing the stains on her hands in guilty remorse.
She’s not your grandfather’s or your Bard’s Lady Macbeth. She’s Nikolai Leskov’s and Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” from Leskov’s 1865 novella in which ghastly Katerina Izmailova murders her husband and father-in-law — inter alios — before being deported to Siberia, where she kills her lover’s new mistress and, finally, herself.
The opera version was a huge hit at its 1934 premiere, with 200 performances in the Soviet Union, New York and London. But when Stalin saw it in 1936, he walked out in high dudgeon before the end, offended by its anarchic sexuality. A subsequent Pravda editorial said its success abroad was due to “tickling the perverted taste of the bourgeoisie with its fidgety, screaming neurotic music.” The opera vanished overnight in Russia, and from then on composer Shostakovich faced the daily fear of secret police knocking at his door.
“Lady Macbeth’s” ferocity and cruelty are no less powerful in the film, which omits the final exile sequence while stressing the theme of women’s subjugation in provincial 19th-century European life. Shostakovich called it a “tragedy-satire” of a smart woman surrounded by monsters: “I feel empathy for her,” he said, with murder as her only means of revolt in the masculine hell of the Tsarist era.
The performances here are uniformly terrific, led by newcomer Ms. Pugh, deathly calm yet electric in the title role — who ranks up there with Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina in the gloomy pantheon of tragic heroines. Mr. Jarvis plays Sebastian as a kind of Russian Stanley Kowalski — hunky and good in bed but clueless.
The cinematography rivets our attention with every frame, not just in the shocking murder scenes but also in the details: Opening windows for the first time, Katherine watches dust particles float in the stuffy room’s air. A skinny old cat, straight out of the original story, reflects her strange dream about a cat with Boris’ head. My favorite image: her formal posing next to Boris’ upright coffin — with just the slightest hint of a smirk.
Sans musical score, Mr. Oldroyd maintains masterful atmospheric dread and suspense: How long till Katherine is pushed to the limit? How far will she go, and how diabolical will she be thereafter? He uses the conventions of Victorian melodrama to subtly comment on modern race and gender issues. But this is something more torrid and sordid and morally ambiguous than anything the Brontes or Hardy could ever concoct.
No Thane of Fife shows up to right this Lady Macbeth’s wrongs. Her creators don’t give a tuppence for comeuppance. This one makes Shakespeare’s original drama — so frightening that superstitious actorscall it only “the Scottish play” — look like a sitcom by comparison.