Film reviews round-up: Lady Macbeth, The Promise, Heal the Living, Suntan

★★★★☆

Dir: William Oldroyd, 88 mins, starring: Florence Pugh, Christopher Fairbank, Cosmo Jarvis, Bill Fellows, Paul Hilton, Naomi Ackie

William Oldroyd’s riveting debut feature Lady Macbeth plays like a cross between Wuthering Heights and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Inspired by Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, this is a film noir in the guise of a Victorian costume drama.

Set deep in the English countryside, it features characters in crinolines, waistcoats and top hats – and yet deals with some extremely primal emotions.

Katherine (Florence Pugh) is first spotted as a bride in a white veil, looking miserable on her wedding day. Her husband Alexander (Paul Hilton) is a brutal man, the son of a wealthy and very creepy mine owner, Boris (Christopher Fairbank). They live in austere fashion in a draughty country house.

Early on in the film, there is very little dialogue. Alexander doesn’t say much to his new wife other than to grunt at her lines like “your night dress, take it off!” or “face the wall!” as we hear him masturbate frantically in the background (not something that Heathcliff ever did in Wuthering Heights.)

Oldroyd shows Katherine being dressed by her maid (Naomi Ackie), who pulls her corset so tight that you think she is going to have the life squeezed out of her and who combs the curls out of her hair in vicious fashion.

There are close-ups of her sitting at table or on a huge sofa (which features so frequently in the film that it almost becomes a character in its own right.) We often see the back of her head. The sound editing (the insistent water torture-like ticking of the grandfather clock, the scratching of the paws of a pet cat) is amplified.

In its depiction of the ferocity of repressed desires of its characters, the film evokes memories of Jane Campion’s The Piano. However, there is no equivalent to the score that Michael Nyman wrote for that movie. Music here is used very sparingly.

This is very deceptive storytelling. Alice Birch’s screenplay seems early on to be portraying Katherine as the passive female victim in a very patriarchal society. She hardly speaks. Her husband and father complain if she so much as sets a foot outdoors and they insist on her waiting up when Alexander wants to drink the night away.

Not only is she unhappy. She is profoundly bored. That’s why she responds with such curiosity when Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), the new groomsman, begins to flirt with her. He is the catalyst, revealing a side of Katherine’s character we have only guessed at before.

She is defiant, wilful, carnal – and with a capacity for plotting and subterfuge that makes her at times seem more like Myra Hindley than the Jane Eyre archetype she first appeared to be.

Plot-wise, Lady Macbeth is very predictable – but that doesn’t make it any the less engrossing. Oldroyd, working on a modest budget, manages to create an eerie, tense and at times grotesque atmosphere.

His approach, at least initially, is subtle and restrained. He will show the enormous stress that the maid Anna is feeling at her mistress’s behaviour by the sheer violence with which she kneads the dough.

He has an eye for Addams Family-like Gothic absurdity, both in the scenes in which we see Katherine posing for a primitive photograph with the body of a recently deceased man or when she is at dinner with her curmudgeonly father-in-law.

Oldroyd will cut abruptly from Katherine having sex with her lover to a shot of her drinking tea and looking as demure as a 19th-century spinster. He also has an eye for landscape, throwing in moody shots of mist-covered moors and Hansel and Gretel-like forests in the scenes in which the characters escape the house.

Just occasionally, between sex scenes, poisonings and beatings, there are moments of playful lyricism. The one innocent character is the little 7-year-old boy Teddy (the doe-eyed Anton Palmer) who turns up at the house in unexpected circumstances.

As Katherine teaches him about trees, birds and the outdoor life, he looks at her in utterly rapt fashion, telling her she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

Young English actress Florence Pugh gives an outstanding performance as the mercurial heroine who provokes pity one moment and disgust the next. Her Katherine is mischievous, confrontational and will go to extreme lengths to get what she wants. At the same time, she is utterly sincere in her passion for Sebastian.

Lady Macbeth is one of the most original and assured British debut features of recent times. At a time when far too many cosy and derivative costume dramas are being made, it has abrasiveness, attitude and originality in abundance.

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Terry George, 133 mins, starring: Oscar Issac, Christian Bale, Charlotte Le Bon

The Promise is one of a number of recent films dealing with the Armenian genocide. This is subject matter that has also been touched on in Atom Egoyan’s self-reflexive Ararat (2002), and Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014).

Director Terry George comes at the material as if he is making a Doctor Zhivago-like romantic epic. The downside to his approach is that in concentrating on the love triangle at the centre of the film, he risks losing sight of the history behind the horrific events he is chronicling.

The film is absorbing enough to watch in its own TV mini-series-like way but it also feels strangely melodramatic. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is often so arch.

Oscar Isaac plays Michael Boghosian, a humble apothecary from a remote Armenian village who comes to Constantinople in 1914 to study to become a doctor. He pays for his classes with a 400 gold crown dowry given to him by the family of the woman he has arranged to marry – but clearly doesn’t love.

In none too subtle fashion, the film sets the scene for what will soon happen. At the very moment Michael walks into the store owned by his wealthy merchant uncle, he is warned by the other tradesmen that the “Armenian dog” will rob him.

Although the city seems prosperous and cosmopolitan, it is obvious that the prejudice against the Armenians is already simmering away. What the film fails to provide is any explanation where this hatred comes from.

A few moments later, Michael captures his first glimpse of Ana (Charlotte Le Bon), who is introduced as a “great violinist’s daughter, just back from Paris”. Constantinople is “blessed by her beauty”, we are also told.

She is the equivalent of Julie Christie’s Lara in Doctor Zhivago but with some ballet moves thrown in for good measure. Michael very quickly becomes besotted by her. The hitch is that she already has a sweetheart, the US journalist Chris Myers (Christian Bale), a hard-drinking, hard-living but eminently courageous and far-sighted figure.

In other words, he’s like the hard-drinking, hard-living but eminently courageous and far-sighted American caught up in the Rape of Nanking that Bale played in Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers Of Shanghai.

Chris loves Ana. So does Michael – but the young would-be doctor has given his promise that he will marry his fiancée back in his home village. Of course, it’s not a question of if but when his resolve will weaken… and the answer to that is not very long at all.

The Promise may be set in First World War Ottoman Turkey but it is full of scenes that seem familiar from movies about the Nazis in Germany. For example, Constantinople has its own equivalent of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht (Night Of The Broken Glass) just after the war starts.

During this night, Armenian owned shops are looted and apartments are vandalised. Any of those identified as Armenian are assaulted on the streets and many are interned. We hear the Armenians referred to as “a tumour in our midst”. There are later scenes of Armenians in cattle trucks being taken off to camps.

Away from the city, there are pogroms. The Ottoman army leaders describe these in euphemistic fashion as the “relocation of the Armenians”. In most cases, this relocation is straight to the grave. In the entire film, there is a single sympathetic Turkish figure, Michael’s well-connected fellow medical student Emre (Marwan Kenzari) who is squeamish in the extreme, very lazy and hedonistic but also doggedly loyal.

The focus shifts away from Constantinople as the main characters are separated, reunited and then separated again. Bale’s Myers files reports on the atrocities from the provinces, where he is driven around in a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-like car.

Michael is desperate to help his family. There are scenes of massacres and of refugees, including old people and orphans, on an epic trek across treacherous terrain. You can’t help but feel a chill when Aleppo, across the desert, is cited as one of their potential destinations.

This is not a film that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will appreciate. To his credit, George is highlighting the Armenian genocide (still fiercely denied in certain quarters) in a big mainstream movie which is bound to reach at least some spectators who weren’t aware of the extent of the Armenians’ suffering. (1.5 million Armenians died in this period).

It’s the nature of this kind of storytelling, though, that the focus is on the individual protagonists, not on the fate of the Armenian people as a whole. The attempt here to provide an upbeat ending, with the message that survival is the best revenge, can’t help but seem perverse.

The love story is at the centre of the film… but the romance between Ana and Michael is inconsequential next to the extreme suffering that The Promise is also trying to chronicle.

★★★☆☆

Dir: Katell Quillévéré, 104 mins, starring: Tahar Rahim, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Dorval, Bouli Lanners, Kool Shen

Heal the Living has the plot of a very conventional medical melodrama but is made in a self-consciously poetic and metaphysical style. It’s the story of a heart transplant. The heart belongs to a young, good looking surfer dude who didn’t wear his seatbelt. The woman needing a transplant is a middle-aged musician (Anne Dorval), mother of two young adult sons.

This is a film full of grace notes – self-contained scenes that play like mini-symphonies. There is an astonishingly well-shot surfing sequence in which we see the surfer Simon (Gabin Verdet) above and below the waves.

Katell Quillévéré has a Kieslowski-like instinct for finding the uncanny and poetic side in even the most banal of scenes. She is very precise and factual when it comes to the procedures surrounding the transplant: the consent forms, the way the recipient is chosen, what happens to the donor’s body, how the organ is delivered between hospitals.

Some of the medical detail is on the macabre side. Squeamish viewers will struggle with the imagery of sternal saws and knives. At the same time, there is a very emotional, piano-based soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat. The director throws in flashbacks and gives us an insight into the family and love lives of both the main characters.

This is an ensemble piece. Tahar Rahim plays the male nurse who initially seems harsh and unsympathetic to the grieving parents but goes to extreme lengths to honour their wishes. At the same time, he is having his own love affair with a fellow hospital worker.

Bouli Lanners plays a crusty but kind-hearted surgeon who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lech Walesa. Emmanuelle Seigner is the grief-stricken but still very chic mother. This is an intelligent, probing and cleverly constructed film but one completely shorn of any dramatic tension.

There is none of the panic or stress that you find in most hospital-set dramas. The director’s graceful and poetic storytelling style doesn’t allow for even a hint of suspense.

★★★★☆

Argyris Papadimitropoulos, 104 mins, starring: Makis Papadimitriou, Eli Tringou, Dimi Hart,

There have been many films about middle-aged angst and disappointment but what makes Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ Suntan so striking is that it is set in the middle of August on a baking hot Greek island, full of tourists out to have a good time.

Kostis (Makis Papadimitriou) has just been appointed as the island’s doctor. He’s a paunchy, taciturn man – so not exactly Marlon Brando in Last Tango In Paris mode. He seems utterly dependable. In fact, he is full of doubt and self-loathing.

Not long after his arrival on the island, Kostis is befriended by a group of young hippy-like hedonists who come into his surgery. They regard him as if he is their pet koala bear. He buys them beer, sunbathes with them, hits the island’s nightclubs with them and becomes dangerously obsessed with one of them, Anna (Elli Tringou).

As he begins to stalk her, he neglects his work in the surgery and begins to alienate the local people on whose support he depends.

Shirley Valentine this is not. Amid the sex, partying and sunshine, Kostis isn’t the only local Greek man struggling to make sense of his life. There are other ageing, desperately seedy Greek lothario-types who try to prey on the tourists. Kostis is looking for connection and commitment while Anna and her friends simply want to have a good time.

There’s a pathos and mounting creepiness about him. Papadimitriou (who bears more than a passing resemblance to John C Reilly) excels as the grubby, middle-aged would-be Peter Pan who completely loses his moral bearings.