Lady Macbeth (2017)

Lady Macbeth (2017)

IMDB Rating 7.2/10 (as on .02.05.2017)

1h 29min | Drama

In this adaptation of Nikolai Leskov's novella "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk, a 19th century young bride is sold into marriage to a middle-aged man.

Director: William Oldroyd

Writers: Nikolai Leskov (based on the novel by), Alice Birch (screenplay)

Stars: Florence Pugh, Christopher Fairbank, Cosmo Jarvis

IMDB link  Here

Movie rating ★★★★★  

A lusty, jaw-droppingly amoral bodice-ripper

Tim Robey

Lady Macbeth might suggest a recherché spin on the Scottish play, but it’s more like Lady Chatterley gone ballistic – a British, period-set chamber thriller with a star-making turn on one side of the camera, and one hell of a directing debut on the other.

Florence Pugh, previously best-known for playing an ill-fated schoolgirl in Carol Morley’s The Falling, will rocket straight to the ‘It’ list off the back of this film, and rightly so. She plays Katherine, a once-impoverished trophy bride in misty northern England in 1865, whose boredom begins to instil a ticklish idea of sexual rebellion.

The source, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is a short novel by Nikolai Leskov, written in that very year, and previously adapted by Shostakovich into his opera of the same name. Alice Birch’s script deftly ferries it to our shores, and the cool eye of director William Oldroyd, a stage specialist until now, carefully sets a fuse.

So often in lusty bodice-rippers, the sexual chemistry has to be taken as read, but here it’s clawing, flushed and undeniable – singer-turned-actor Jarvis has a dumb mutt’s animal magnetism that’s brutal and essential, so that we believe them both, maybe more than ever in a story of amour fou, as intoxicated to terrible degrees by their lust.

Shot with natural light seeping into its bluish interiors, with the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi as a cited inspiration, the film is like a very cold oven which eventually blows a gasket. Naomi Ackie, as the household’s black maid, can only quiver and watch, more trapped in Katherine’s machinations than she can even know.

It reverberates with ideas about the power structures of Victorian England – the hierarchies of class, gender and, perhaps most unusually, race. But what’s especially fascinating about Pugh’s Katherine is how she is both mutineer and opportunist – fighting the power, but also claiming and using it, bending it to her will.

She’s not a character you’ll forget in a hurry, and Oldroyd’s portrait, less watercolour-delicate than study in soot, leaves you chilled to the marrow.

 Read full review at Telegraph

Movie rating ★★★★☆  

With murder in her mind  

Mark Kermode

The Russian author Nikolai Leskov’s lurid Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was first published in Dostoevsky’s Epoch magazine in 1865, and has inspired varied adaptations ranging from a 1934 Russian opera by Shostakovich to Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s 1962 film Siberian Lady Macbeth. This latest incarnation transfers the twisted passions of the source material to the rugged landscapes of Victorian-era north-east England, where repression and rebellion conjoin in a heady cocktail of lust, intrigue and murder. In the process, Lady Macbeth both cements rising star Florence Pugh’s deserved reputation as one of the UK’s most exciting screen talents and announces theatre graduate William Oldroyd as a film director of immense promise.

Having perfectly captured the ambiguous tone of Carol Morley’s superb psychological mystery The Falling, here Pugh walks a tightrope between audience sympathy and revulsion, a dramatic balancing act that she pulls off with aplomb. Early scenes of Katherine’s escape from confinement on to misty moors have the same Brontë-esque lust for life that Andrea Arnold captured in her 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Encounters with stifling patriarchy amuse and appal in equal measure, as Katherine proves more than a match for any man – smarter, sharper and more deadly. All of which means that when things turn nasty, we are sufficiently invested in her future to feel horribly complicit in her crimes.

In its darkest moments, Lady Macbeth owes a clear stylistic debt to the deadpan provocations of Michael Haneke, particularly when cinematographer Ari Wegner’s widescreen frame captures an unspeakable act in a single, static long shot, the elegant symmetry accentuating the horror. Elsewhere, handheld close-ups lend an urgent intimacy to Katherine’s emotional and physical travails. This may be a low-budget affair (reportedly less than £500,000), but it’s as richly textured as any more expensive period piece.

Much of that texture comes from the expressionist sound designs, which juxtapose the clatter of window shutters and crockery inside the house with the more sensual throbs of wind, rain and thunder that sweep through the exterior scenes. Music cues are kept to a minimum; I counted only three, each one a brooding ambient hum in the nightmarish aftermath of a mortal sin. Plaudits to Ben Baird and Dan Jones for their joint work conjuring this superb aural landscape.

While Pugh’s Katherine dominates the screen, she is fascinatingly mirrored by Naomi Ackie’s Anna, the maid who loses her voice as Katherine finds hers. Anna is subservient and humiliated, Katherine demonised and vilified, yet both are products of a society that imprisons women, whether within servants’ uniforms or cage-like crinolines. In one particularly alarming scene, Katherine looks on while Boris forces Anna to crawl on her knees “like an animal”, just one of a number of feral transmutations that find characters likened to tethered dogs, hung up like sows, sleeping in barns or brushed and tressed like horses.

Other terrific supporting turns include established talent Golda Rosheuvel and young newcomer Anton Palmer, whose appearance derails Katherine’s plans to turn the world upside down. Worth noting, too, that the film’s unblinkered approach to ethnicity (diverse, but never overtly mentioned) not only enriches the drama by challenging the whitewashed facade of much period fare, but also ensures that every role is filled by the best possible player.

Amid such an accomplished ensemble cast, Pugh is an electrifying presence, imposingly framed by the blue, gold and black hues of Holly Waddington’s costumes. Identified as a future star by my Observer colleague Guy Lodge back in 2014, this fearless performer seems hellbent on greatness. Appropriately, with a raft of forthcoming roles including a portrayal of British wrestler Paige in Fighting With My Family, Pugh’s in-demand status has ensured that this mesmerising Lady Macbeth shall sleep no more.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Movie rating ★★★★☆ 

 William Oldroyd’s riveting debut feature Lady Macbeth plays like a cross between Wuthering Heights and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Inspired by Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, this is a film noir in the guise of a Victorian costume drama.

Set deep in the English countryside, it features characters in crinolines, waistcoats and top hats – and yet deals with some extremely primal emotions.

In its depiction of the ferocity of repressed desires of its characters, the film evokes memories of Jane Campion’s The Piano. However, there is no equivalent to the score that Michael Nyman wrote for that movie. Music here is used very sparingly.

This is very deceptive storytelling. Alice Birch’s screenplay seems early on to be portraying Katherine as the passive female victim in a very patriarchal society. She hardly speaks. Her husband and father complain if she so much as sets a foot outdoors and they insist on her waiting up when Alexander wants to drink the night away.

Not only is she unhappy. She is profoundly bored. That’s why she responds with such curiosity when Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), the new groomsman, begins to flirt with her. He is the catalyst, revealing a side of Katherine’s character we have only guessed at before.

She is defiant, wilful, carnal – and with a capacity for plotting and subterfuge that makes her at times seem more like Myra Hindley than the Jane Eyre archetype she first appeared to be.

Just occasionally, between sex scenes, poisonings and beatings, there are moments of playful lyricism. The one innocent character is the little 7-year-old boy Teddy (the doe-eyed Anton Palmer) who turns up at the house in unexpected circumstances.

As Katherine teaches him about trees, birds and the outdoor life, he looks at her in utterly rapt fashion, telling her she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

Young English actress Florence Pugh gives an outstanding performance as the mercurial heroine who provokes pity one moment and disgust the next. Her Katherine is mischievous, confrontational and will go to extreme lengths to get what she wants. At the same time, she is utterly sincere in her passion for Sebastian.

Lady Macbeth is one of the most original and assured British debut features of recent times. At a time when far too many cosy and derivative costume dramas are being made, it has abrasiveness, attitude and originality in abundance.

Read full review at The independent

Hell hath no fury like a sexually frustrated young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to an impotent sadist, as this noir-tinged historical drama demonstrates. Relocating Russian author Nikolai Leskov's classic 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District to 19th century England, British theater director William Oldroyd's crisp feature debut invokes a familiar pantheon of female literary outlaws from Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina to Lady Chatterley.

Lady Macbeth mostly operates within established period conventions, but draws fresh blood from antique material thanks to a sparky cast, subtle nods to contemporary race and gender issues and a hefty shot of gothic melodrama. Premiering in Toronto, it should lure a wider audience with its seductive mix of sex, murder, proto-feminist subtext and fabulous frocks.

First published in Dostoevsky's literary journal Epoch, Leskov's novel is a lurid parable of crime and punishment set on a provincial estate in Tsarist Russia. Shostakovich later adapted the story into a celebrated 1934 opera, almost ending his career by outraging his Stalinist overlords. Several big- and small-screen versions followed, including one by the Polish master Andrzej Wajda in 1962. World premiering in Toronto this week, Oldroyd's English-language adaptation delivers an impressive amount of bite on a tight budget. It was made for under £500,000 ($670,000) as part of a regional film-funding program supported by BBC Films and the British Film Institute.

Playing her first lead after a handful of minor screen credits, the 19-year-old Pugh already has clear star quality, her heart-shaped face and aura of latent mischief recalling the young Christina Ricci. Holding her own opposite some experienced stage veterans, she plots a confident path through a subtle performance that is mostly just below the surface, all sly glances and subversive innuendo. Her stage-drunk scenes, a test for any actor, look authentic rather than forced. Another small but important detail for British viewers is her mastery of the distinctive Northumberland brogue, which is not her native accent, an achievement shared by the entire cast.

In previous iterations of Leskov's story, evil is ultimately punished and moral order restored. While Oldroyd and screenwriter Alice Birch stay largely faithful to the novel's plot and characters, they deviate in the final act, ending on an ambivalent note more attuned to cynical modern sensibilities. Following the example of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, they also make the bold decision to use race as code for class, casting black or mixed-race actors in the main peasant roles. This anachronistic touch goes unmentioned by the characters, but clearly speaks to contemporary racial tensions.

Lady Macbeth inevitably betrays its limited budget in places, from its single country-house location to its occasionally cramped, televisual feel. Some of the more bizarre plots twists, such as when Anna is conveniently struck mute after witnessing evil deeds, are dated and contrived. Katherine's hasty leap from bored housewife to amoral serial killer also feels psychologically implausible, a hangover from a bygone age when rebellious women were routinely dismissed as dangerous hysterics.

That said, Lady Macbeth has a deliciously amoral darkness and a crisp visual look. Oldroyd and his Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner shoot their handsome interiors with a pleasingly formal symmetry and their wintry landscapes with a mist-shrouded, painterly romanticism. Katherine's glamorous outfits are a subplot in themselves: Her vivid blue dress becomes emblematic of her liberated spirit in a cruelly colorless world, while the constricting crinolines and corsets she wears beneath speak volumes about patriarchal oppression. Full of subtle pleasures, this is a small but impressive debut.

 Read full review at Hollywood Reporter