Her lover Sebastian lives halfway between indoors and out, exiled to the stables. The greatest visual contrast is between the confined spaces of the manor house, where Katherine is ordered to remain, and the wuthering outdoors, where she seems to gain strength. Symmetrical interior shots are interspersed with bursts of handheld tracking, and there are horizon-expanding wide shots of the moors: purple-fringed with heather or steel-grey under lowering skies. Mostly, though, the camerawork is unruffled, like Katherine. An abrupt cut emphasises the brutality of a beating the sound of a character dying behind a door evokes a desperate, scrabbling dog. Oldroyd’s camera too is averted from the worst of the physical violence, which takes place just off screen or at a nearly safe distance.ĭevoid of cosseting music, the sound mix is disconcerting, with bone-crushing effects and the wind buffeting the characters around on the moor. The novella’s supernatural horrors have been discarded, leaving just a dark-eyed, pale-furred cat slinking around the house and a horse’s corpse slowly rotting in the woods to recall its demonic visions. The violence is primarily psychological: the cruelty inflicted on Katherine, the abuses suffered by Anna, the guilt that haunts Sebastian. Alice Birch’s screenplay reduces the narrative to its revenge-drama essence. Stripped back, even in comparison to Leskov’s short source text, the film has scant dialogue, and less music. Set in an unnamed region of northern England in the 19th century, Lady Macbeth forgoes the luxe flourishes of much period filmmaking. It’s clear, though, that Katherine craves blood as much as sex: her teeth crunch on Sebastian’s knuckle before she succumbs to him she insists on kissing his seeping wounds.įlorence Pugh, Naomi Ackie and Cosmo Jarvis in Lady Macbeth (2016) When the lovers first meet, Anna is naked and being weighed like a pig by a circle of taunting men a porcine reference quite the opposite of Arabella Don’s bold introduction in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Katherine’s audacious response is not to cover her shame, but to kill those who could expose her or thwart her ambition to be the mistress of herself, and the household. Left alone when the men travel on business, Katherine takes increasingly less care over appearances, until the whole county knows that she is sleeping with a groom, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) – their repeated, urgent sexual encounters rarely allowing any time to disrobe. As Anna tightens Katherine’s corset and scrapes a brush through her tangled hair, Lady Macbeth presents the rituals required of a lady of the manor as painful, perverse and constricting. Each morning and evening her maid Anna (Naomi Ackie) assists with the rigmarole of crinolines and hair-pinning, and at night her husband Alexander’s physical interest in her begins and ends with demanding she remove her nightdress – leaving her to shiver alone. Trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage to an older man, and bound by the confines of their draughty moorland home, Katherine (Florence Pugh) has no occupation for her days except to dress and undress.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |