She follows the sound outside, to the barn, where a group of farmhands and stable boys have stripped Anna and thrown her into the scale they use to measure sows. One afternoon, her husband and his father out of town, Katherine is startled awake from her nap by the clattering of footsteps on cobblestone. She and Katherine have a tepid relationship: They make small-talk, but Katherine is mostly uninterested and unmoved by Anna. This is Anna (Naomi Ackie-heartbreaking), a maid in the Lester household, who is the first black woman we meet in the story. There is a character that screenwriter Alice Birch adds to Lady Macbeth, one not present in the novel nor the opera. There is unimaginable work in speaking up. The language often escapes me, leaves me speechless, confused, sad, and tired. In a world where we are just beginning to expose the frequent and violent effects of patriarchy to men (and they, too, for once, seem to be listening–some of them, at least), it will take a long time to explain how women-white women-have worked to uphold this system. I don’t think we had the language to talk about it afterwards. This was, as politely as I can say it, a mistake. I saw Lady Macbeth in the dead weight of summer with two male friends. The house creaks whether or not she moves. That’s the end of that conversation.īoredom sets in in a cold and furious way. Early in the film, she asks her husband’s permission to walk the grounds “I like the fresh air, I like being outside,” she stammers, before her husband forces her to strip in front of him. His father, Boris (Christopher Fairbank-meaner, still), the owner of the estate, barely acknowledges her, breaking his silence only to occasionally scold her.Įvery day, Katherine is laced up in a fine gown-royal blue, maybe, or a deep opalescent purple-and travels downstairs to sit on the couch by herself. Her husband, Alexander (Paul Hilton-mean) has no interest in her physically or emotionally, forcing her each evening to strip silently and face the wall as he masturbates. “Out, out––” But Lady Macbeth does not have witches or moving trees or ghosts or soldiers. You know of the dagger in the night, and you know of the wife, lurking in the background. You have affiliations, no doubt, with the name “Macbeth.” You went to high school. None of these titles, you may notice, are Macbeth- the man, the myth, the etc. Lady Macbeth, the film released this past year, is adapted from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the novella by Nikolai Leskov published in 1865, not to be confused with Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the opera by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in 1934. She marries a man at least two dozen years her senior in an old, echoey church, the tenor of his singing voice bouncing off the stone walls. Anything about her family, her background, or what defined her before she carried around the title of “Mrs.” like a bag of stones, is left unsaid. Her name is Katherine (Florence Pugh-formidable), but it is about to be Mrs. She wears white, of course, because it is her wedding.
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