THE TIMES – review extract
Jude Law immediately joins the upper ranks of the great screen Henry VIIIs with an incendiary, movie-defining performance in firebrand. Directed by the Brazilian-Algerian Karim Aïnouz, it takes as its subject the closing, paranoid and increasingly incapacitated years of Henry’s reign, and specifically his relationship with sixth and final wife Catherine Parr Tudor version of Sleeping with the Enemy, is propelled forward by this fundamental tension. Henry is a psychopath who, at any minute, can have Catherine murdered. And if he uncovers her alliance with Anne? Unthinkable. Vikander proves a suitably stoic foil to Law, and plays Catherine in a mask of brittle inexpressiveness when faced with her husband’s grotesque displays. |
It is Rome in 1611 and the teenage Artemesia Gentileschi, her mother dead, is growing up in a house full of men - and in a world controlled by men. Her father, the painter Orazio, is proud of her artistic talent, but rueful that she is better than her brothers. And he slowly comes to the terrible realisation that her genius outstrips his abilities. Cue drunkenness and outbursts of violence. But
still Artemesia follows her burning desire to be taken seriously as an artist. A handsome new painting master, Tassi, enters the Gentileschi circle. At first he seems to represent artistic freedom, but then a terrible act of violence upends everything. Disobedient covers these early years of Artemesia's life, as she struggles with the fallout. She ends up in court facing abuse and worse from a judicial system designed by men. Elizabeth Fremantle has written four excellent novels set in Tudor and Stuart England. This, however, is her best work, her equivalent of Gentileschi's painting Judith Slaying Holofernes. Disobedient is vivid, unflinching and sometimes justly furious. (AS) |