Gothic (Russell, 1986): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.40pm
This film is part of the Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Chicago Reader:
It was a dark and stormy night . . . There’s obviously no cure for Ken Russell (Crimes of Passion, Lisztomania),
the Bulwer-Lytton of our cinematic subconscious, but this travestying
of history and literary imagination seems even more overwrought than
usual, a free-form, psychodramatic yowl in the direction of Nightmare
Abbey. It’s an evening with Lord Byron and the Shelleys that Russell
serves up, mad Fuselian geniuses after his own demented design (and if
not, well, literary history be damned), and the seeds of the
Frankenstein myth and modernist self-consciousness are laid on a long
night of excremental (as in sacramental) excess and hysterical acting
out. The thematic intermixing of sexuality and death, of imaginative
rebirth and visceral disgust, is characteristic of Russell, as is the
cartoonishly heavy hand with which he trowels it all on: he’s as subtle
as a supermarket tabloid, and just as obsessed with literal,
concretizing images of perversity. Still, it’s fascinating to watch this
frenetic concoction unwind (an Altered States before the fact, hallucinogenically revised), though I’d probably stop short of calling it a pleasure.
Pat Graham
Here (and above) is the trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment