Florida's Film, Television and the Arts Magazine
Lady
Lady Isabella is the grand dame of Ravenhyde Hall. Her son is in boarding school. Her uber-wealthy husband is not around, most probably dallying with a pool boy on a tropical island. Her only companions are Ricky Raven, a black raven who lives on the property, and her long-suffering housekeeper, Becky.
Lady, the new film directed by Sam Abrahams, is chaos personified. The actors, representing two glaringly different societal classes, are loud, brash and always in each other’s faces, judging, controlling and cajoling. They relish battles with each other as well as with everyone who comes into their orbit. Most importantly, Lady Isabella is a ‘woman of a certain age’. In life, and certainly in Hollywood, women over 40 begin to feel they’re disappearing – that they’ve stopped being ‘seen’. We saw that most recently with Demi Moore and The Substance. And that, I believe, is where the crux of Lady finds its center.
Isabella is certainly a bit ‘off’. She stages her own death scenes for self-amusement, and claims she’s a ‘big animal lover’ yet everything in the home that once drew breath is now stuffed or mounted on the walls. She likens herself to ‘aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians’, but unlike that globe-trotting family, Isabella (Sian Clifford) hasn’t left her 26-bedroom home in years. She’s painfully aware she’s got no personal friends, no life outside the walls of her rolling hills estate, revealing ‘it’s hard to leave someone when you can’t even leave the house’.
Enter Sam (Laurie Kynaston), a young film director, struggling for recognition in the business. He doesn’t have much of a voice and he’s using Bella to climb the ladder at Netflix, hoping to use her story as a launchpad to a hit biopic.
He’s forever smug about how much younger he is than Isabella, calling her ‘old’ at the height of one of their verbal battles. Initially she takes the age difference as a challenge to coax him into her bed, but later the knives truly come out.
Both Isabella and Sam bring their own particular idiosyncrasies to the relationship. Much like Lady herself, Ravenhyde is outwardly in disrepair, yet inside it’s filled with grand pianos, beautiful furnishings and doors leading to rooms that haven’t been opened in years. Sam picks fights with his film crew, has terrible stage fright, can’t speak in public and is desperate to prove himself – to himself and to the world.
Ironically, it’s when Isabella begins to feel ‘seen’ by Sam as a woman, and not just the topic of his documentary, that she begins to physically disappear. Abrahams and cinematographer Korsshan Schlauer use this plot point to advance their film. The vanishing starts with her hands, travels up her arms, and eventually she’s completely transparent. The more she’s verbally and emotionally transparent with Sam, the more they see who they are without their facades, the more intrigued they become by each other and the faster Isabella corporally vanishes. Ironically, the faster Isabella vanishes, the more physically Sam is turned on by the situation.
Lady closes with a depth of feeling and honesty between the characters that’s unexpected and refreshing, the characters stepping into rooms and flinging open doors to their psyches that had been wedged shut.
