Writer and Director: Francesca McBride
Emerging film-maker, and self-confessed “Shakespeare nerd”, Francesca McBride’s short film Lady Macbeth Was Never A Girl, brims with a quiet, watchful confidence.
McBride’s film follows schoolgirl Jessica (played by McBride) as she navigates her day at a senior school. We are firmly in the 1990s: mobile phones are conspicuous by their absence. McBride argues that the rigidity of gender roles did not need a manosphere to flourish: they were already long established.
Jessica and classmate Ashley (a coolly observant Eva Smith) sit through their English class: today they start studying Macbeth. Their teacher, Miss Fletcher (Pene Herman-Smith), asks the class what sort of man is Macbeth? She argues that Macbeth’s downfall is defined less by his actual character, but more the expectations of masculinity. He should be “strong, brave, unshaken.” As Ashley archly comments, even after the blood has flowed, and Macbeth seizes the crown, everyone’s still not happy.
During the class, Jessica spots a pair of jogging bottoms hanging from a goalpost outside. She, with Ashley, watch a group of boys bomb around the football pitch after class. The boys are unapologetically loud, taking up as much space as they feel like. Jessica grabs the jogging bottoms after the game, and takes them home to dry. She wears them into gym class next day, where the teacher berates her for not wearing the uniform ‘skort,’ After gym, Jessica and Ashley sit together, musing on their thoughts about Macbeth, and in particular Lady Macbeth’s insistence that she be “unsexed.” The girls discuss the probability that being a woman is never Lady Macbeth’s issue, but rather the way she is treated because she is a woman. Lady Macbeth is destined to play the wife.
Despite its 8-minute running time, McBride’s film is loaded with societal and cultural observation. McBride’s commentary on gender politics, and the conformities reinforced by schools, is razor sharp. The conversation between Jessica and Ashley, as they contemplate how “everything’s sorted before we even show up,” speaks to a truth still not resolved, thirty years on. The act of rebellion – ditching the god-awful skort for a pair of jogging bottoms – is small but seismic. The subtle shifts in perception – the gap between how the girls feel and how they’re told to feel – is crafted in just a few words. McBride’s camera never misses a moment. The sensuality between the girls is underscored but never fully declared; McBride doesn’t believe in spoon-feeding their audience.
There is an assurity in McBride’s film-making: she doesn’t lean into the 90s nostalgia, but instead holds a modern lens up to this age to examine what were, at the time, assumptions about sex and gender that felt cast-iron. It is the seeming permanence of these ideas that McBride openly criticises: the lack of nuance, blatant media misogyny and the one-size-fits-all thinking that came to define the 90s and early 00s. An intimate portrait of personal evolution, and self-awareness, there is a rare poetry in Lady Macbeth that lingers long after the credits have rolled.
Lady Macbeth Was Never a Girl is currently screening at festivals.
