I have tried to write a review of Lady Macbeth three times so far and failed each time. It is easy to write a synopsis of this Film but I don't want to do that. The film is about one of the oldest cinematic story- a young wife, with an older husband, who falls in love with a younger man. We've seen it often from the male point of view- think for example of The Postman always rings twice- a story which focusses on John Garfield as the central narrator. Lady Macbeth plays with this narrative because the central character is not the male lover, not the husband, both of whom have barely any character at all. The central figure in the film is the wife- she is the only character in this film with any character whatsoever. Florence Pugh plays this Lady Macbeth- Catherine- brilliantly and her performance is definitely the best thing about the film. What she shows though is a character who is neither likeable nor admirable- though possibly sympathetic.

It is easy to sympathise with Catherine in the film. She is married to a husband who not merely is older and implicitly not sexually attractive to her but who will not give her any sexual outlet. Her father in law humiliates her- demanding that she has a child when he knows that his son will not take the necessary action. She is confined in doors by the two of them and by respectable opinion and she is clearly constrained in everything she can or might do. She is treated by her husband as though she were a commodity that his father bought for him, along with a piece of land that as he says would not even provide enough fodder for a cow. This is a woman trapped in a sexist household and constrained in a sexist society. Even after her husband dies, she is still threatened by the potential threat of a male coming into her world and taking it over. Perhaps most symbolically, the film traps Catherine in her house- which feels very Victorian and starchy. She is also trapped by her clothes- we see her again and again being put into corseted dresses, a symbol of her constrained circumstances.

However whilst she is sympathetic, she is not likeable. Catherine is not dislikeable because she has an affair. I think any reasonable woman or man seeing her position would see how an affair was natural. She wants in the early parts of the film affection and sexual desire which her husband will not, for some unexplained reason, give her. However, she is still not likeable. There is another set of relationships in the film apart from the relationships between Catherine and the men in her life and that is the relationships between Catherine and her social inferiors- including her maid and her lover. Catherine's relationship with her maid- Anna- is vicious and she exploits her position as a mistress to the full. She clearly treats Anna badly at several points in the film. This is a woman who sees nothing in making her maid complicit in murder. She also steals Anna's love interest. With her lover, Catherine's behaviour may not be as coercive, but it is still clear that their relationship is all about sex and not about his personality or his qualities. Catherine is unlikeable because she constrains other characters in similar ways to the ways in which her husband and father constrain her.

What I took from Lady Macbeth was a horror story. It is set in an imagined 19th century- where slavery existed in the North of England. Her fieriness may remind one of Catherine Earnshaw- but that Catherine's story is very different. This is fictional setting I think makes me generalise this story- it is not about a particular place or time but about a human condition of constraint. What's interesting about it I think is that no character in this film really has a character. Catherine's character is the most fully developed- but I think for her, we have three real insights- firstly the effects of sexist constraint, secondly her exploitation of class constraint and thirdly her raw desire for pleasure and independence. Character has been obliterated by convention. In an odd way, the very stylised dialogue which made me think of Pinter reasserts that point. Human beings communicate in this film to express lust, domination and order- rather than to communicate about their different worlds. Catherine has no apparent interests- her one interest (going outside) is really a symbolic choice by the director to suggest her desire for freedom.

Some reviewers have seen this film and come across with much less complicated feelings about it than mine (take Deborah Ross in the Spectator for example). My own analysis is that this film is in a sense a fable about how extreme constraints on human behaviour produce a humanity drained of everything save for its desire for freedom. The constraints on Catherine and on Anna mean that their personalities are only really visible in their conformity or struggle against those constraints. It is suggestive I think that these two- both of the characters who we feel sympathy with in the film- are left at the end of it both mutely looking into an uncertain future.