William Oldroyd (2016)

Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has a nifty title (a presumably intentional echo of Turgenev’s 1859 short story, Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District) – although Leskov’s protagonist’s stimulus to murder is very different from her Shakespearean namesake’s.  Katerina Izmailova is frustrated in a passionless marriage and by subservience in a household ruled by her father-in-law; sexual desire for a farmhand on the family state dispels her boredom. In these respects, Katerina has less in common with Lady Macbeth than with the eponymous heroines of Madame Bovary, published a few years earlier, and Thérèse Raquin, which appeared two years later.   Over the years Leskov’s story has become a 1934 Shostakovitch opera of the same name, a ballet (Lady Macbeth ’77 – Katarina Izmailova) and Siberian Lady Macbeth, an Andrzej Wajda film of 1962.   Now William Oldroyd has made Lady Macbeth, with a screenplay by Alice Birch that relocates the story to rural Northumberland in the 1860s.

Oldroyd, directing his first cinema feature, sets things up with assurance.   Katherine (Florence Pugh) is married to Alexander (Paul Hilton) as part of a package in a deal his father Boris (Christopher Fairbank) struck:  she came with a piece of land described by her husband as ‘not fit for a cow to graze upon’.  She’s expected to spend her days indoors, reading the Bible, and Oldroyd presents the routine morning preparation of Katherine for her constricted, circumscribed existence.  The maid Anna (Naomi Ackie) brushes her mistress’s hair and tightens her corset with punishing vigour.  The Madonna-blue of the crinoline that Katherine wears is grimly apt.  On their wedding night, Alexander tells her to remove her nightdress; she does so and stands awaiting further instructions; he climbs into his side of the bed and turns away from her to sleep.  The next time he issues the bedtime order to strip, the camera stays on Katherine and the soundtrack indicates that her husband is masturbating.  In spite of Alexander’s eschewal of physical contact with her, Boris blames Katherine for failing in her duty to supply a child and heir. An incident at a mine owned by the family takes Boris away from home temporarily.  Alexander also departs on business:  lack of enthusiasm for his wife, combined with antipathy towards Boris, prolongs his absence.  While father and son are away, Katherine begins an affair with the stablehand Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis).  She first encounters him while he and other workers on Boris’s staff are sexually humiliating Anna.  Katherine puts a stop to this; soon afterwards, Sebastian forces his way into her chamber.  After a brief struggle, she submits to and enjoys the wholly new experience of being manhandled.

Jonathan Romney in Screen International describes William Oldroyd’s debut as ‘an uncompromising attempt to make that rare thing, a genuine British art film’.   This seems right enough; the kind of art film it is, is a main reason why I don’t care for the technically assured Lady Macbeth.  Oldroyd and the cinematographer Ari Wegner put a frame round the images of Katherine’s domestic stagnation.  You register immediately that they’re meant to evoke the composition and formality of portraits in art history, and thus reinforce our sense of Katherine’s claustrophobia.  As the images succeed one another, you register the same thing again – and again.  Katherine’s bedroom shutters open to reveal, also repeatedly, a ‘sky … white as clay, with no sun’.  The effect of this is, oddly, to mute in the viewer’s mind the attraction that the outside world holds for her.

Although the film, for the most part, is well acted, the main characterisations grind to a halt.  Florence Pugh holds the screen and is particularly impressive when she has the opportunity to express conflicting feelings – as she witnesses what’s being done to Anna in the stables or tries to prevent Sebastian entering her room.    The dichotomy between her girlish appearance (Pugh was twenty when the film was shot) and Katerina’s homicidal deeds is striking throughout – although this is another case of receiving the same message over and over.  The Wikipedia plot synopsis suggests the novella is rapidly eventful and it seems Alice Birch’s adaptation is more faithful to Leskov in the early than the later stages – one of the departures from the original consists in reducing the number of plot incidents.  I don’t know if the theatrical versions of the material do the same but it may matter less if they do.  The conventions of opera and ballet allow performers to spend a long time elaborating a particular feeling or reaction.  In contrast, the naturalistic traditions of cinema dictate that, unless a film treatment is highly stylised (more stylised than Lady Macbeth is), a viewer is liable to get impatient with slow-moving or protracted emotional description.  (This one does, anyway.)

The actors playing characters who are bumped off sooner rather than later are therefore at an advantage.  The strong-faced Christopher Fairbank has a tendency to overact; as Boris, his screen time and lines are rationed and he’s convincing.  So is Paul Hilton’s rattish Alexander, both in the wedding night scene and, on his short-lived return home, his big verbal outburst against Katherine.  Sebastian and Anna, in contrast, stay the course (although one assumes, in the last seen of them, that the days of both are numbered).  Naomi Ackie is powerful in her ashamed, distraught escape from the stables and again in one of the film’s strongest scenes, which foreshadows Katherine’s later incrimination of Anna.  Katherine lets the maid take the blame for drinking the supply of Boris’s good wine that she herself has consumed during his absence.  In response, Boris brands Anna an animal, makes her get down on all fours then tells her to leave the room.  Obeying the last order, Anna is too frightened to think of getting up; she scuttles out on hands and knees.

In the larger role of Sebastian, Cosmo Jarvis is no more than adequate and his tearful confession in the climax feels forced.   Jarvis is physically right, though, and the casting of him and Naomi Ackie is one of Lady Macbeth‘s most interesting features.  Ackie is black and Jarvis, although he isn’t, has a racially ambiguous look.  Last autumn, I saw in quick succession two pieces of drama in which servant roles were played, unexpectedly, by actors of colour:  on television, in the BBC serialisation of The Moonstone; on stage, in a national touring production of Night Must Fall.  This kind of casting is obviously right from a diversity point of view.  In the context of essentially realistic British period drama, however, it draws attention to the fact that no one mentions the unusual ethnicity of these characters.  In Lady Macbeth, the racial situation is complicated with the arrival, following Alexander’s death, of his mixed-race illegitimate son and ward Teddy (Anton Palmer) and the little boy’s maternal grandmother (Golda Rosheuvel).  She too is non-white but socially superior enough to treat Sebastian with disdain.  The ethnic element here is expansive (it goes well beyond Andrea Arnold’s black Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights) – it doesn’t need mentioning in the script in order to be meaningful.  This is especially true of the film’s denouement, which departs sharply from the source material.  Katherine, who begins the story on the receiving end of mid-Victorian gender inequality, eventually and mendaciously exploits social and racial hierarchies of the time to accuse Sebastian and Anna of murder, and to save her own fair skin.  Whereas the original Lady Macbeth and Nikolai Leskov’s Katerina perish, William Oldroyd’s protagonist ends up not just alive but carrying new life inside her:  she’s pregnant by Sebastian.  She now wears black – her serial killing ensures she’s almost continuously in mourning – instead of Virgin Mary blue.

Katherine is a versatile murderer:  Boris is poisoned, Alexander bashed to death with a blunt instrument, Teddy suffocated.  Sebastian assists in the second and third of these killings.  As someone who works in stables, he’s conspicuous by his absence from the death of Alexander’s horse.  Katherine shoots and buries the animal in order to hide the evidence of her husband’s nocturnal return to the estate.  William Oldroyd has Katherine kill the horse single-handed in order to make this memorable and upsetting.  She’s not a sufficiently good shot to dispatch the animal at the first time of asking, and it neighs in fearful pain.  At the end, this death has registered more strongly than any of the human ones.  That’s partly a reaction against the means used by Oldroyd to give the sequence impact but it says something too about Lady Macbeth more generally. The title guarantees there will be blood yet the film that follows is an academic, and in that sense bloodless, exercise.

4 May 2017