Mary Shelley continues Al-Mansour’s commitment to depict how women struggle against social strictures to achieve their goals.
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Based on an original screenplay by first-time Australian screenwriter Emma Jensen, Mary Shelley is Saudi Arabia first female director Haifaa Al-Mansour’s sophomore feature, following her breakout debut Wadjda. The film stars Elle Fanning as the eponymous author of Frankenstein, Douglas Booth as the poet Percy Shelley, Tom Sturridge as the poet Lord Byron, and Stephen Dillane as Mary Shelley’s father, the political theorist William Godwin.
In 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, now famously known as Mary Shelley after her marriage to Percy Shelley, is the child of a single parent. Her mother died ten days after she was born and her father has since remarried. Her disagreeable stepmother (Joanne Froggatt) discourages Mary’s literary pursuit and demands she abides by domestic rules. This sets the ground for Mary to eventually elope with Percy Shelley, whom she first meet in Scotland where she got sent away by her father after an altercation with her stepmother.
The first half of the film is ostensibly about the relationship between Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley, their romantic trials and tribulations. After Mary elopes with Shelley, bringing along her equally suffocated step-sister Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley), they struggle with financial problems and Mary, in particular, struggles with Shelley’s adulterous “free love” ways when she discovers that Shelley is already married with a child.
The latter half of the film, where the trio find themselves in the chateau of Lord Byron, focuses on the genesis of Mary Shelley’s magnum opus Frankenstein. Trapped indoors due to a blizzard and bored out of their senses, they find themselves game for a challenge proposed by Byron: to write a ghost story. What could have been the most interesting part of the film, the depiction of how Frankenstein was conceived and written, is given short shrift. Or perhaps it was a good idea not to spend too much screen time on the act of brainstorming and writing of a book, given how difficult it is to visualise and depict what is essentially an interior process.
Mary Shelley continues Al-Mansour’s commitment to depict how women struggle against social strictures to achieve their goals. But, whereas in Wadjda, Al-Mansour was handing material familiar to her and on a much smaller budget, in Mary Shelley, she has to learn to interpret someone else’s script and to work on a studio level. Al-Mansour’s relative inexperience, coupled with Jenson’s uneven script, results in a rather stiff performance from Fanning, unsubtle dialogue, laggard pacing, and some key scenes that are poorly staged, combining to make a film whose merits, of which there are some, fail to exceed its weaknesses.
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