It's safe to say that the creation of no literary work has been so mythologized as that of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That famous soiree near Lake Geneva – where Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary exchanged horror tales – has been recreated in Bride of Frankenstein, Haunted Summer and Ken Russell's characteristically uninhibited Gothic. Yet this remains the first serious cinematic study of the woman herself.
Shooting largely in Ireland, Haifaa al-Mansour, the talented Saudi director of Wadjda, has delivered a sumptuous period drama that teases out important issues about gender imbalances in the arts. The film-makers deal briskly with that stormy Swiss evening – the nightmare sequence is ill-advised, but brief – and focus on Mary’s dealings with her distinguished father William Godwin, the apparently awful Shelley and the era’s sexist literary gatekeepers.
Elle Fanning, though a martyr to Californian vowels at times of high emotion, has the charisma to convince us that such a young person really could wield genius for the ages. Suggesting a James Franco with all the bones hammered down, Douglas Booth is tolerably ghastly as Shelley. David Ungaro shoots it all with murky, oily grace.
Unfortunately the film lacks any singular slant. It fills in details about Mary’s life, but there’s never any sense of a thesis being advanced. It will not, you have to hope, come as a surprise that publishers patronised (and patronise) female writers. We could probably guess that the romantic poets were as dreary in their sexist debauches as their rock-star successors a century-and-a-half later. There’s no angle, no surprise, no driving motivation.
The picture is also hampered by some wearily clunky biopic writing. “That’s Shelley. Beautiful. Isn’t he?” someone says. “That’s Byron. They say he is mad, bad and dangerous to know,” nobody actually says, but you wouldn’t be surprised if they did.
Still, though there are few (ahem) electric jolts, al-Mansour’s film passes the time pleasantly in the style of posh Sunday night telly. That may be enough to be going on with.
Opens: July 6th
