'Lizzie': a myth of gothic feminism

The figure of Lizzie Borden has circulated like a bloody gothic ghost among the black page of the United States and feminist iconography.

A parricide who got involved with an ax with her father and stepmother in a crime that gave goosebumps to the society of the time.

Although Borden was declared innocent - the judge believed that a woman of her class was incapable of such an atrocity - the shadow of doubt left her marked for life and popular culture appropriated her ax and her name.

For some, a disturbed bloodthirsty; for others, a woman oppressed by a father who did not let her breathe. From the

filmmaker

Lizzie Borden, the events that occurred on a hot August day at the end of the 19th century have also inspired countless books, some series and various plays. It also attracted the producer and protagonist of this film, Chloë Sevigny, who in

recreates the harrowing backstage of a crime whose reading never stops turning.

Lizzie

starts on the day of the famous crime and then rewinds to the claustrophobic and chauvinistic Borden household, dominated by a father whose tyranny feeds on his most fractious and independent daughter. But the film directed by Craig William Macneill focuses on the friendship between Lizzie, as Sevigny, and Maggie, the maid played by Kristen Stewart. The chemistry between the two actresses, with a superior Stewart in her self-absorbed dramatic key, is the best of a film that tries to investigate (and largely succeeds) in the mechanisms of the devilish puzzle of a family marked by the abuse of the father. A harassment that is measured here with a deranged double murder that, far from being idealized, is shown in all its crudeness.

It is a film that does not answer all the questions, but, little by little, it gains strength and body until it transmits to the viewer the unbreathable oppression and the psychological and physical abuse of a sick home.

lizzie

Direction:

Craig William Macneill. 

Cast:

Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Jamey Sheridan, Fiona Shaw.

Genre:

drama.

United States, 2018.

Platform:

Filmin.

Duration:

105 minutes. 

Premiere:

January 21.

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