Thursday 4 June 2015

Gothic (1986, Ken Russell)



Ken Russell's "Gothic" has a title both redolent of itself and the literary genre whose birth it charts. The renowned English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julia Sands), his soon-to-be wife Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson), and Mary's highly-strung stepsister Claire Clairmont (Miriam Cyr) travel to the Villa Diodati in Switzerland to be house-guests of the infamous exile Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and his fawning physician Dr John Polidori (Timothy Spall). After an evening of excess imbibing laudanum and reading ghost stories to combat the boredom due to being kept inside by a lightning storm, all five denizens of this house of horrors (the Universal-esque title "House of Byron" would have been just as apt) must contend with nightmarish hallucinations and come face to face with their innermost terrors.


As a literary biopic, viewers may find Russell's trademark auteur-ial flourishes offputting, but they are well suited to the subject matter and the larger than life grotesqueries of the characters themselves. Gabriel Byrne portrays the club-footed and lascivious Byron with great relish, and is reminiscent of the gentlemen who essayed the role in the opening prologue to "The Bride of Frankenstein". Spall is twitchy and nervy as Polidori, barely suppressing his homosexual lust for his devilish master, and conflicted with the Catholic upbringing that teaches him such feelings are evil. Polidori would come to chart his leanings, and his tortured feelings for Byron, in "The Vampyre": in which the Western world's first literary bloodsucker Lord Ruthven is a thinly-veiled portrait of the poet.

Julian Sands (the "Warlock" himself!) and Miriam Cyr give a good acquittal of themselves as a soppy and foppish Shelley and the hysterical Claire respectively, but the showpiece of the film is in my opinion the performance of the late Natasha Richardson as the nascent Mary Shelley, whose nightmares of her stillborn child and yearning to bring it back to life give birth (pun intended) to the legend of "Frankenstein". The sequence in which Mary sees a grotesque version of herself - looking spookily like Erica Blanc's succubus from "The Devil's Nightmare" - nursing a baby's skeleton in a crib stayed with me for a long, long time (perhaps i shouldn't have been watching this at eight years old..?).

8 comments:

  1. Ah HA, one I have actually seen. Fortunately I was a bit older than you so I was more inured to the freaky bits, but it's good stuff immaculately filmed. Julian Sands was a pretty good actor, I always wondered wby his career seemed to meander off into obscurity. It was "Boxing Helena" wasn't it? Oh please tell me you'll be covering that one!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's not ruled out.:) But Julian shall forever be The Warlock to me. It IS immaculately filmed, isn't it? A film that makes me want to read has to be good. Does the Ted Danson version of 'Gulliver's Travels' count? I dunno. We'll see.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, you should definitely read Byron. I've got his Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) which I could snail-mail to you if you like.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, Lucy. I am Byron.:) At least, i like to imagine i'm Don Juan, but i'm probably really the cor'se from its tomb rent, ghastly haunting my native place.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Could you not be the woman who walks in beauty like the night instead?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I could, but i don't want to pay for the operation. #problematic #trans #CaitlynJenner

    ReplyDelete
  7. You are a bad man :-P Offer of book loan/gift still stands if you've mislaid yours, or sold it to pay for booze 'n' hookers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Aww, thanks Lucy, but my poetical works are quite safe on a shelf of their very own. Byron's kept company by Keats, Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Duke of Rochester and others. They seem happy up on the top shelf away from the horror and SF stuff.:)

      Delete