You Holy Fool: Lady Macbeth
(first published 3 July 2017)
What kind of woman loves like this? One in a murderously sexual period piece, of course. We all love films that violently tear themselves out of their own corset, so to speak, but William Oldroyd’s blistering debut renders itself beyond intriguing and into totally essential with its acknowledgment of oppression’s layers. Its true heroine is not who she seems to be.
In 1865 England, Katherine (Florence Pugh) is trapped inside her own home. Stifled by her husband’s walls, his cruelty and his father (Christopher Fairbank), her spirit is slowly dying. Her only company is her long-suffering maid Anna (Naomi Ackie), who, significantly, is black. When her keepers take leave on business, she takes a liking to a new stable-hand named Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), also black. Throwing away the rules of class, race and monogamy, her life becomes consumed by her passion for him.
Alice Birch writes a spare yet deep-cutting screenplay, based on the novel by Nikolai Leskov, technically unrelated to the murderous queen of Shakespearean Scotland but unmistakably sharing her DNA. A little Lady’s blood is in Katherine’s veins, or rather… on her hands.
The dominoes of abuse begin to fall by the hand of husband Alexander (Paul Hilton), and echo down visibly through layers of manipulation: by gender, by race, by social status. The price of freedom is heavier than a dead horse: Katherine may fight for her female right to contentment in a way that pleases our 21st century hearts, but the film brilliantly chooses to show us her flaws, adding another extraordinary layer absent from too many period pieces. Her shocking period-correct classism and racial ignorance stand staring at us. They scream without sound, perfectly acknowledging how one type of liberation can come at the cost of another.
You don’t expect a perfect lesson in intersectional liberation from a film full of corsets, but rest assured you get it. The true feminism of this film is not the surface matter of Katherine’s sexuality, but this lesson in her ignorance of other oppressions than her own; how empowerment is useless and hollow unless it is for all women. She may be the fascinatingly twisted antagonistic protagonist, but the heroine of Lady Macbeth is Anna, remaining herself no matter how she is wronged. Films are often called feminist for ‘a woman breaking rules’, but feminism of this film comes from seeing who the rules protect and who they hurt. In forcing these uncomfortable truths on us, this film renders itself a true revolution of historical cinema and female multitudes.
Florence Pugh’s performance is truly a name-maker, she has an angel’s face and mistress’s rasp forming perfect syllables of her many lies. Her poise and calm takes most performers decades to achieve. The other standout is Ackie, an utter masterpiece of survival as softness.
Minimalist visual storytelling is often the result of independent budget necessities, but we all know that to also be the mother of invention. The story develops like a ticking grandfather clock, its beating eventually seeming to quicken when we hear the drip drop of the house master’s spilled poison wine, falling from the dining table in the room where that proud ticking face strikes midnight.
Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design and Thalia Ecclestone’s art direction ensure that mage after sumptuous image ramp up the adrenaline and beauty in equal measures; whether staging Katherine as a decoration in her own house or a writhing, radical seeker of pleasure pulses.
Most of all, Ari Wegner (who I had the honour to see speak after the Sydney Film Festival screening of this film) films her subjects with style that’s by turns idyllic and catastrophic. Her camera’s gaze interrogates and sneers, it doesn’t love. It makes a polished guide to how not to be - the beauty seems conjured in mercy, to balance the poison of a story told in acute honesty. The spaces have opulence yet no comfort, whether framed with pummelling handheld or still as paintings.
Speaking of which, Wegner told us that her main visual references were the work of Vilhelm Hammershoi, whose style is best described as ‘subdued and poetic’. Here that elegant taste is twisted with dashes of Campion mystery and Arnold desire, served with a distinct chill.
Of course the morally twisted people may be the centre of art (they rarely aren’t in some way), Katherine can’t know how to deal with misogynist abuse but we sure do. Films about imperfect humans can be great as long as they do not excuse a type of toxicity that still ruins lives very seriously hundreds of years later, as racism and classism still do. This is a story, that is fascinating as only that – fiction. Intriguing and fascinating does not equal admirable or worthy.
No matter how sharp, this is indeed a woman at the centre of film; even she is more the cause of the hurricane than the calm eye. No woman should be her, yes, but the point is that here is one, a speck dancing in the sunlight of all we can be. The film world embracing that women can be as much of anything as men are (including bad) means there is more room for all the other good. Katherine is beyond a heroine, not even a bloody handed one. She is a pillar of cruelty, a glorious one. Enjoying the flames of this film means seeing that flickering with true eyes. We know Katherine should not be ashamed of sexual selfhood, as others claim she should - it’s her cruelty that matters. Being shameless is only bad when it’s for reasons that warrant a conscience.
What kind of woman loves like this? A holy fool all coloured blue, tossing explosives into her fire of devotion. Whether in song or screen, we know these storms always reign. Our cultural fascination with the beautiful-worst is eternal, it seems we’d rather watch the darkness than live it. Or make it, in Oldroyd’s case. The universality of whispering don’t at a screen makes me wonder how it plays into our emotional lives. Love binds us all, no wonder we love to see films when it binds us to a sinking anchor. Feelings we all know (freedom, boredom, lust) turn into molten acts that we don’t know. What has art ever done but look at human cinders and blow them into flames?
Films like this are what I imagine emotions themselves would dream about – passion or jealousy confused in their beds, seeing a world where they rule. Even a story as specific as this has that purity at its heart, the sheer intensity of our own damn hearts. How much simple would life be without feelings, yet it wouldn’t be life at all, merely existence. Even our holy foolery lets us remember we are still so intensely alive.
