Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is an eighteen-year-old extroverted young woman who, after meeting the charismatic poet Percy Shelley, a man with advanced ideas for the time, falls in love at first sight. In spite of the difference of age they initiate a romance, that is complicated when the family of Mary discovers it, prohibiting that both return to be seen.

To escape the constant rumors, the two go with Claire, the half-sister of Mary, to a house that Lord Byron has in Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, where the young woman conceives the idea of ​​Frankenstein, writing the novel as a Escape route. But, at a time when women writers were not taken into account, she will have to protect her monster and forge her own identity.

Haifaa Al-Mansour (The Green Bicycle) directs this biopic written by Emma Jensen and Conor McPherson (A por todas). Ellen Fanning (Trumbo) stars in the film as Mary, with Douglas Booth (Pride + Prejudice + Zombies) playing her lover Percy and Bel Powley (A Royal Night Out) in the skin of Claire. In the cast we also find Ben Hardy (X-Men: Apocalypse), Maisie Williams (Arya Stark in Game of Thrones), Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones) Tom Sturridge (The Madding Crowd) and Joanne Forggatt (Downton Abbey) ).

When it comes to Frankenstein's monster, it is sometimes difficult to discern if the story told by the novel or the story behind it is more fascinating. I mean, Mary Shelley, the author, could perfectly be a fictional character. Or perhaps that Dr. Frankenstein and his creature, on the other hand, may already belong more to the territory of science than to that of literature and cinema. Be that as it may, this is the initial success of filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour, responsible for The Green Bicycle (2012): addressing the biographical experience of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin - who happened to be Shelley to marry the poet of the same name - as if it were a 'woman's picture', a melodrama focused on the adventure of a woman trying to reassert herself as such in a hostile society. And, of course, all in the context of a film that wants to make clear the female condition of the protagonist: in the background, Mary Shelley is the story of an artist who fights for recognition in a world of men, already try her husband, his friends - Lord Byron, without going any further - or his very own father, an ancient radical come down.

That is the journey that this second long of Al-Mansour tells, already made under the umbrella of a co-production halfway between Hollywood and Europe. We see Mary during her first youth, still living in her widowed father's house, after the death of a mother with an equally artistic and transgressive vocation. We also see her in her first steps as a writer, as a poet who still has to find her own voice, as her father tells her about it. We follow her when she meets Shelley, a rebellious literary man who shows her the ways of love and rebellion. And we continue with her at the moment in which, due to different biographical events, she reaffirms herself as a woman and as an artist, she frees herself from the masculine domain and launches herself to write her first novel, Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, at first anonymously , then with his real name. On the one hand, Al-Mansour - and his screenwriter Emma Jensen - insist on the feminist side of the story, in what constitutes the weakest part of the film, since the claim is mixed with a certain tendency to the more conventional biopic, to the film of 'qualité'. On the other hand, the best of all is that he knows how to extract an energy, a truth, that finally presents the protagonist as a combative girl, but also fragile, whose confrontation with the society of her time has more to do with movies of Nicholas Ray that with the typical British fiction of literary inspiration.

Well, Shelley is also a brittle and vulnerable boy, however much he sometimes appears as tyrannical and macho. And Byron appears on screen as a mix between the young David Bowie and the Viscontian archetype of the decadent aristocrat. In those moments, Mary Shelley becomes a film about the yearnings of youth, always condemned to failure. Or around the life that advances relentlessly and leaves us behind, badly injured and battered. That is why Al-Mansour's film is more convincing when it presents the creation of Mary, the monster of Frankenstein, as a "creature" born of his pain and frustration when he wants to link it to specific events in his biography. And that is why, too, it is more emotional and subtle when it dispenses with the great topics of history that we all know -the birth of the novel in Mary's mind, during her Genevan stay in the house of Byron- and she starts to narrate the small things, the daily tragedies, the way in which a disoriented young woman gradually becomes a woman and an artist, even at the cost of losing faith in love and in life as she had conceived them in her first youth. The greatest virtue of Haifaa's film Al-Mansour is that it could perfectly be the story of a girl who learns to live and write when all her illusions vanish.