mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
"To think that in England, I was woken by larks. Here it is the song of the lesser spotted nubile."
Wave your hands in the air, everybody! It's House Party, 19th Century style! Ain't my type of Bysshe!
There's tripping balls and there's tripping balls. And then there's tripping balls. And then there's whatever the hell Lord Byron, Percey Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori were doing at the Diodati mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Beyond the florid language and sumptuous costumes, it's fascinating to watch how the pastimes of social influencers were no less vacuous in 1816 than they are now. Although, instead of a livestream of "Watch us as we do nothing but drink laudanum all weekend!", at least this particular bout of debauchery resulted in Frankenstein, The Vampyre and Childe Harold. So there's that.
So this could be pretty boring stuff. Bunch of stuck-up aristocrats get wasted and hallucinate their asses off. But when you have Ken Russell at the helm, even if there's not a huge amount of thematic weight except Byron and Shelley's (not-so) latent queerness and a dollop of historical curiosity, you know you're going to get a wild psychedelic ride through whacked out visuals and psychosexual provocation.
Julian Sands as Shelley rather demonstrates his habitual lack of naturalism, but I think Gabriel Byrne is magnificently supercilious as Byron - every inch the depraved and uber-egotistical nobleman. Miriam Cyr and Timothy Spall both contribute great physicality (in totally different ways) to their respective roles. And it's simply impossible not to fall in love with Natasha Richardson.
It's all very self-indulgent but what the hell did you expect? I think it looks amazing from start to finish, and I would nominate this as one of those films which lots of people say is boring, but if you took a 3 minute clip from any random point in the film, you'd be entertained by it. It's one of those films where nothing much is going on narratively, and yet everything is going on at every moment. Just takes a different mindset to enjoy this sort of lunacy, I think.
"Go on. Tell us, my lord, how does it feel to fuck with your own sister?"
"As pathetic as with any female, Miss Godwin."
