#LADY MACBETH FLORENCE PUGH DRIVER#

The only unmistakable element of “Lady Macbeth” is passion, the driver and destroyer of everything even in, and perhaps most potently during, the repressive Victorian Era. Yet that, like other key themes and motivations in the movie, are left for us to interpret, not to be lectured about by the filmmakers. Pugh is a revelation, so stoic as a victim, unleashed as a lover and calculating as a survivor, yet still able to convince us she’s a teenager, however fast she’s developing beyond her years.Ĭolorblind casting - or is it? - of some other key roles adds intriguing racial dimensions to “Lady Macbeth’s” strict gender and class dynamics, reminding us that, however different things might have been in England at the time, the story does take place during the last year of our Civil War. 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. It’s been, perhaps, even longer since an utter sociopath like Katherine has been presented with so much genuine sympathy. It’s been awhile since sex scenes in a literary production have been as copiously convincing as Jarvis and Pugh’s are here.

Metaphorically speaking, of course, she’s the type who’d brush up on her James M. Which there may not be once the men of the manor get back, but Katherine has plans for them. Oldroyd somehow makes palpable boredom fascinating, while Pugh speaks - no, more like radiates - volumes while just sitting in the sitting room, quietly corseted.īut then the old guys go away on business, Katherine makes a beeline for the moors, and is soon taking pages from Lady Chatterley with the rougish farmhand Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) like there’s no tomorrow. This pattern repeats itself for some while, and Katherine’s frustration is compounded by the fact that Alexander and his even more hateable father Boris (Christopher Fairbank) forbid her from leaving their big, Spartan mansion. She’s basically been bought for him as part of a land deal or something, and despite a resigned desire on her part to make the most of their wedding night, all he wants to do is look at her spectacular naked body, not touch it. The film opens with 17-year-old Katherine (Florence Pugh, a real find) unhappily getting married to 40-year-old sourpuss Alexander (Paul Hilton). No singing allowed here, however, as Oldroyd and screenwriter Alice Birch have shifted the action from Russia to a chilly English country estate made to feel extra icy by religious prudery, loveless marriage and patriarchal privilege gone amok. The film is an adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” Shostakovich made a pretty good opera out of the same material. Bathed though it is in rough behavior and raw sexuality, “Lady Macbeth” maintains a minimalist discipline that chills the bone even while the action onscreen boils the blood.Īnd no, it’s not Shakespeare. The first feature directed by British theater wiz William Oldroyd is also, by far, the most aesthetically severe and artistically accomplished of this bunch. The likes of “The Beguiled” and “My Cousin Rachel,” however, look like tea parties compared to “Lady Macbeth.” There’s been a rash of 19th century erotic thrillers this season.

Lady macbeth florence pugh