Shelley’s monster hit
It’s Jane Austen with sex, drugs and poetry as we meet the rebellious teenage girl who created Frankenstein
MARY SHELLEY tells the story of the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, through the eyes of the book’s teenage author.
If you’ve ever wondered how an 18-year-old girl came up with an idea so powerful and terrifying it still resonates two centuries later, this film is your answer.
elle Fanning stars in the title role, and Douglas Booth plays her lover, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their wild and wanton love affair provided the emotional and intellectual education — and damage —which resulted in the sensational Frankenstein.
Fanning is terrific, pink-cheeked and full of intellectual hunger. That hunger turns sexual when 16-yearold Mary meets 21-year-old Percy on a trip to Scotland. Not long after, he is pink-eyed with opium and wine, leading her down the Gothic-romantic road to social ruin.
Mary’s stepmother, played by Joanne Froggatt, of Downton abbey, is against the liaison, but her father William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) welcomes Percy to his literary salon.
The two young people believe in free love, just as Mary’s mother did. She was early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Percy and Mary have their first tryst on her grave in the film.
But when Mary gets pregnant at 17, and the baby dies, the free-living dream becomes a nightmare. Percy, it turns out, has a wife and a child. The situation is not helped by Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister (Bel Powley), who sets up what looks like a ménage à trois with the couple.
Claire introduces Percy to the (in)famous poet lord Byron, and the party really kicks off. The girls run away to europe with Percy, and fetch up at Villa Diodati by lake Geneva, where Byron is holding court.
he is played by Tom Sturridge, more histrionic than Byronic, wearing lashings of eyeliner. Meanwhile Percy looks like Pete Doherty of the libertines on a rough morning, with bed-head hair and slurred speech.
after much claret-drinking and drug-taking, the scene reeks of a psychedelic night at some music festival. after all, the romantic poets were the rock stars of their day. What surprises here, given the seriousness of their literary work, is that they are all so young. and daft.
But the unconventional life created unconventional fiction, and during that stay in Switzerland, Byron’s suggestion of a short story competition between them resulted in the germ of the idea for Frankenstein.
In the film, Mary goes to see a scientific demonstration of ‘galvanism’, the use of electricity to
reanimate the muscles of a dead frog, and inspiration results. The idea of a monstrous creature who turns to violence after he is abused and neglected may have come from her own trials and tribulations.
Mary Shelley is directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour, the woman who made Wadjda, Saudi Arabia’s first film to be directed by a woman, about a girl who wants to buy a bike.
The themes of liberation and repression unite the two dramas, and Al-Mansour seems freed from that stiff Englishness that often percolates our costume drama. As a film, Mary Shelley is not perfect, and the budget is small, but when you think that Frankenstein came out just five years after Pride And Prejudice, this different take on that time is fascinating.
It’s Jane Austen with sex and drugs and poetry. What’s not to like?
SWIMMING With Men stars Rob Brydon and an all-male synchronised swimming team in mass mid-life crisis.
There’s an assumption that men pointing their toes and circling Busby Berkeley style in formation in the water will be absolutely hilarious, but quite often the film ends up treading water. Still, comedian Brydon gains our sympathy as Eric, a bored accountant with a sagging marriage and a growing and inexplicable feeling of panic about his life in suburbia.
His wife Heather is played by the perky but long-suffering Jane Horrocks. She has just become a local councillor, and their teenage son is leading his own life.
Only when Eric is swimming lengths of the local pool does he feel some sense of calm.
When Heather gets involved in her new job — and it seems with a smarmy new colleague — Eric goes tonto and runs off to a hotel. But he continues to swim in the evenings, and ends up geekily advising the male synchronised swimmers about mathematical imbalance in their formations.
Eric is recruited to the team, and finds the camaraderie and purpose missing in his life.
The South London aqua-lads include Daniel Mays, Rupert graves, Adeel Akhtar and Thomas Turgoose, as well as Jim Carter (it’s somehow wrong seeing Downton’s Carson in his swimmers). Charlotte Riley is their coach.
Each man has his own burden — divorce, a criminal career, a difficult partner — but the swim team’s constitution insists all that is left at home, and full concentration given instead to back flips, frog kicks, synchronised dives and elegant body alignment.
It looks like the actors are really performing their moves, so points and prizes for that.
OLIVER PARKER, who was behind the flaccid remake of Dad’s Army, is the director. Despite the Speedos, Swimming With Men is not quite The Full Monty, lacking the political resonance and outrageous fun.
The inspiration for this latest story came from the documentary Men Who Swim, about the Swedish male synchronised swimming team, and the Swedes play themselves when the film goes to the world championships in Milan.
The original team was called the Stockholm Art Swim gents and was formed ‘as a protest against the meaninglessness of life’.
The English version is more ordinary, but radical in its own way, with a celebration of men’s love handles, big bellies, and even hairy backs.
As it says in the swim club constitution, ‘what happens in the pool stays in the pool’.