Lady Macbeth.

These days I'm not as impressed with many of the cinematic releases and don’t go to the cinema anywhere near as much as I used too so it's really nice to find a movie that's as highly commendable as Lady Macbeth (2016). Firstly let me say that it's not based on the Shakespearean play only inspired by it.  This latest interpretation of a novel by the Russian novelist and short story writer Nikolai Leskov who wrote his novel Lady Macbeth of the Mitsensk in 1864, the story that was rightly said to be a 'picture of the most unrelieved wickedness and passion' which in turn went on to inspire an opera of the same name. Directed by theatre director William Oldroyd with a brilliant screenplay by Alice Birch this drama is set in North East England in 1865 and filmed in the Northumberland National Park close to a beautiful area of Northumberland where I was fortunate to stay earlier this year.

 

The wonderful Florence Pugh. 

Katherine is stifled by her loveless and unhappy marriage to Alexander a man twice her age. When both Alexander and his brutal father Boris leave the family house on separate business Katherine is left with only an assortment of servants and estate workers. When her sexual frustrations get the better of her she embarks on a passionate affair with Sebastian a young stable hand which leads her to unleash a force that will drive her on a pathway of evil with a determination to make sure that she gets her own way in affairs of heart.

 

Katherine and the love of her life. 

You can probably tell that I was very impressed with this great British movie and certainly with the calibre of the acting involved. None more so than with the 21 year old Oxford born actress Florence Pugh as the strong minded Katherine. This is her first lead role but you may have seen her in her debut feature film performance in the mystery drama directed by Carol Morley The Falling released in 2014. It may be a clique but her role in this latest release can truly be described as an award winning performance. It’s strange but it is the strength of Pugh’s performance that gives you a sneaking admiration for the character even though you know that you should really dislike her. Also cast in this wonderful period drama are the American actor Cosmo Jarvis as Sebastian, Christopher Fairbanks, still probably best known as the plasterer Moxey in Aug Wiedersehen Pet which he appeared in between 1983 and 2004, as Boris and Paul Hilton as Katherine's husband Alexander.

The Falling.

Seeing the statement 'a film by Carol Morley' is a recommendation in it self. Having previously seen two of her films, her first full-length feature film Edge (2010) which tells about a collection of random misfits who descend on the hotel on the Sussex coast of England in the middle of a snow-covered winter landscape, and her docudrama Dreams of Life (2012) a movie which attempted to reconstruct the life of a 36 years old young woman, Joyce Carol Vincent, who lay dead for 3 years in her London flat, I was looking forward to seeing her latest feature film outing as writer and director.

 

Carol Morley.

Set in an Oxfordshire all girls day school in 1969 The Falling (2014) is about sexual hormonal hysteria driven by sexual repression of a group of teenage girls and there female teachers. The two main characters are Lydia ‘Lamb’ Lamont (Game of Thrones Maisie Williams, who based on this role certainly has a future in the industry) whose father has run off leaving her agoraphobic mother Eileen Lamont (Morley regular Maxine Peake) to look after her and her brother Kenneth (Joe Cole). At school Lydia becomes infatuated with the sexual permissive Abigail Mortimer (Florence Pugh) and they form a very close loving friendship, not just exhibited by carving their initials in a tree but by some very intimate integration between the two friends. After a rather unexpected event, which places Lydia in the limelight, the school is involved in an epidemic of the hysteria manifested by fainting spells.

 

Best of friends Abigail and Lamb.

The agoraphobic Eileen Lamont.

This movie should put Carol Morley up there with other British female filmmakers of stature including Lynne Ramsay, Clio Barnard and Andrea Arnold. It’s a powerful fascinating film, poetic, with an autumnal dream like landscape helped by the cinematography of Claire Denis’s long time calibrator, the French born Cesar Award winning Agnes Godard and her 1960’s camera lenses. The original soundtrack is by Tracy Thorn who is best known as one half of Everything but the Girl. The viewer is forced to decide what is realism and what is alternative reality in a film that certainly crosses the boundary between the two with its deep-rooted sexual awakening of young womanhood.