![]() ![]() ![]() Like the novella, the movie opens up some interpretive leeway as it invites your sympathy for Katherine. The movie is based on “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” an 1865 novella by Nikolai Leskov that Dmitri Shostakovich turned into an opera and Andrzej Wajda adapted into a film. Oldroyd doesn’t tip his hand, forcing you to choose. Adultery soon begets murder, but even when Katherine is standing over a second corpse, it’s not obvious whether she’s a newly sprung prisoner of gender with a reasonable sociopolitical alibi (the patriarchy made her do it!) or just a psychopath in a fetching peacock-blue gown. ![]() She starts a bold, increasingly reckless affair with a groomsman, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), a rough number wildly out of his league and depth. Alexander leaves - there’s trouble at the family colliery - creating a void that she rapidly fills. Something happens, of course, rocking Katherine, the story and the visual order. Of Madame Bovary, the theorist Stephen Heath wrote: “The window is the frame of Emma’s dissatisfaction.” The same holds true for Katherine, whose window reveals the life that she’s been cut off from, even as it reminds her, day after lonely night, of the freedom on the other side of the glass. Bidden to stay indoors - somehow the fresh air would be bad for her, or so the men of the house insist - she spends much of her time staring out a window, a familiar pastime for repressed, yearning women in fiction. It’s unclear if Katherine can read at times she barely speaks.įor the most part, Katherine watches, and we watch her watching, as the quiet grows louder, and the stillness grows eerier. Everything looks superficially lovely, especially Katherine, who is brushed and cinched, primped and readied by her maid, Anna (Naomi Ackie), like a doll that no one plays with. There seem to be no books in the house, which is maintained by beaten-down servants and overseen by Alexander’s even more unpleasant father, Boris (a good Christopher Fairbank). Katherine is soon bored, but the director, William Oldroyd, ensures that you aren’t, with his use of sepulchral quiet, mesmerizingly steady framing and unnerving order, in which nothing is ever out of place, especially nothing human. This remains the template for a somewhat mysteriously cheerless, loveless marriage that finds Katherine more of a prisoner than a wife. Their first night together, he brusquely orders her to undress, only to crawl into bed, leaving her naked, untouched and puzzled. She’s soon in the bedroom with her husband, Alexander (Paul Hilton), a scowler with angry, accusatory eyes who isn’t interested in her sexually or any other way. ![]() Set in 1865 rural England, “Lady Macbeth” opens with Katherine at the marriage altar, her head draped in a white veil that suggests virtue and slyly hints at the blood that will spill. At just 17, Katherine looks like the innocent flower, but something wicked this way comes seductively, then savagely. Yet part of this movie’s ticklish nastiness is that at first it isn’t at all clear whether she will be the master of doom or its helpmate. Certainly the invocation of Shakespeare tips that there’s something dangerous about the lady of its house, an opaque beauty called Katherine (a very fine Florence Pugh). You may think you know her, that she’s the one who sleeps with death, the one pouring evil into her husband’s ear. It takes a while to figure out who the title character in “Lady Macbeth” really is. ![]()
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