MOVIE REVIEW : The Passion and Poetry of ‘Haunted Summer’

In Ivan Passer’s “Haunted Summer” (AMC Century 14), five youthful, life-intoxicated aesthetes, afire with rebellion and revelry, spend an idyllic summer in a lakeside mansion: the Villa Deodati of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Besides Byron (Philip Anglim), there are Percy and Mary Shelley (Eric Stoltz and Alice Krige) and Dr. John Polidori (Alex Winter). It’s an exceptional group, for its radical political and sexual views, its extreme youth (three men in their 20s, two women in their teens) and its extraordinary literary gifts. Extraordinary, too ,is their sexual omnivorousness. In the film’s perspective, based on Anne Edwards’ 1972 novel and research by scenarist Lewis John Carlino, it’s a summer of free love, with a dash of polymorphous perversity.

Shelley shares amorous romps with his still unwed Mary and her half-sister, Claire Claremont (Laura Dern), who is pregnant by Byron. Byron, 28-year-old senior of the group, has made conquests of Claire and Polidori and casts fiery glances at everyone else as well.

Outside, waves gently lap the banks, the sun bathes the hillside and breezes waft through the still, perfect trees. The quintet, dabbling in the occult and drugs (laudanum and opium), read poetry aloud, argue politics, flash erotic signals and drift through lake and landscapes that would have bewitched John Turner, sights exquisitely caught by Fellini’s frequent cameraman, Giuseppe Rotunno.

Their relationships are an over-fertile seedbed of ideas and literary fancies and a curious tangle of Eros and morality: Byron believes evil is innate, Shelley that man is good and evil is imposed on him. But this is no unfettered paradise. Within eight years, all three men will meet untimely deaths, Polidori by suicide, Shelley in a boating accident and Byron of fever, on a Greek military adventure. The women will survive for decades.

“Haunted Summer” tells the same story Ken Russell used for his 1986 film “Gothic.” But “Gothic” was a nightmare Arabesque, preoccupied with the night on which Mary’s “Frankenstein” and Polidori’s “The Vampyre” were composed or dreamed--and its characters behaved less like poets than denizens of a Hammer Horror film, conceiving not “Frankenstein” but “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Carlino has given us exactly what Russell’s scenarist, Stephen Volk didn’t: a sense of Shelley and Byron as poets, of Mary and Polidori as novelists, a real delight in the kind of language they used and their own relish in using it. The flamboyant Russell dragged the nightmares up and waved them around. Passer keeps them buried, teasing them almost to the light.

Czech emigre Passer has made at least two masterpieces, the Czech “Intimate Lighting” and “Cutter’s Way.” He’s a director who rarely forces his material on you; it blooms slowly, urged on by a quietly lyrical, realist style. It’s a key to Passer’s intentions that he’s cast young American performers, plus the lovely South African Alice Krige, the cast’s standout, instead of Britishers. The Americans, especially Stoltz’ sweetly smiling Shelley, Dern’s gangly and insecure Claire and Anglim’s urbane Byron, seem more youthful and playful, and, in a special way, more innocent.

Working with “Haunted Summer,” a project developed for John Huston, and for which Huston’s longtime art director, Stephen Grimes, has prepared sumptuous designs and found stunning Lake Como locations, Passer abandons himself to soft, rapt, amused wonder. Barring one stilted scene of soap operatic revelations, his film has a bewitching smoothness, quiet affection.

Ultimately, it’s about the artist-as-rebel. But it’s less psychological vivisection than elegant romance, a sweet-tempered comedy of manners and morals. The poets are not sacred beasts but holy fools. And the anachronistic cast gives us some of that poetry, that holiness, that foolishness. “Haunted Summer” (MPAA-rated R for nudity and sex) is not a film for everyone. Some audiences, jazzed up to the point where they take no pleasure in poetic language and poetic scenery, may not enjoy it at all. Your reviewer confesses that he can and does; you may as well.

‘HAUNTED SUMMER’

A Cannon Group Inc. presentation of a Golan-Globus production. producer Martin Poll. Director Ivan Passer, Script Lewis John Carlino. Executive producers Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus. Music Christopher Young. Camera Giuseppe Rotunno. Production design Stephen Grimes. Editors Cesare D’Amico, Richard Fields. Costume design Gabriella Persucci. With Philip Anglim, Laura Dern, Alice Krige, Eric Stoltz, Alexander Winter.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).