Review: Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers, a disastrously inept adaptation of James’s classic novella of psychological gamesmanship and literary obsession. The filmmakers have leached the richness, sophistication, and suspense from the novella and replaced them with inert melodrama and desperately gratuitous sex scenes. Despite the presence of James Ivory as an executive producer, the whole thing feels less like an erudite and emotionally complex Merchant-Ivory literary adaptation and more like a high school theatrical production directed by Zalman King.

The film’s problems start with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who not only appears in nearly every frame of the film but also provides a weighty voiceover narration. As Morton Vint, a renowned American biographer who takes off for Venice to research the life of the long-dead Byronic poet Jeffrey Aspern (played in flashbacks by Jon Kortajarena), Rhys-Meyers is absurdly unconvincing throughout. With his gratingly thin American accent, stilted line readings, and rigid, glowering facial expressions, the actor demonstrates all the range and emotional depth of Derek Zoolander. He evokes none of Vint’s intelligence or passion, rendering him instead a dull, hectoring cipher.

Rhys-Meyers seems to have no idea who Vint is, and neither does Landais and co-screenwriters Jean Pavans and Hannah Bhuiya. The character spends the film trying to get a hold of letters from Aspern belonging to an elderly dowager, Juliana (Vanessa Redgrave), who had a steamy affair with the poet in her youth. Vint does this mostly by attempting to woo Juliana’s shy niece-cum-caretaker (Joely Richardson), who lives a quiet life dominated by the old woman. But there’s no drama or suspense to Landais’s rendering of this tale.

The film unfolds as a series of long, drawn-out dialogue scenes in which the characters rhythmlessly banter back and forth, interrupted by laughably smoldering flashbacks in which Aspern and Juliana (played as a young woman by Alice Aufray) screw each other in overheated softcore sex scenes—some featuring a third participant, identified in the credits only as “Second Romantic Poet” (Nicolas Hau)—that feel wildly out of step with the bland chamber drama of the rest of The Aspen Papers.

But even the film’s bad sex is preferable to its dopey dream sequences, which find Vint stumbling around the alleyways of Venice encountering his doppelganger and stabbing it to death. This is no doubt symbolic of…something, but in context, it comes off as a risibly amateurish attempt to capture some of the murkily menacing Venetian atmosphere of such masterpieces as Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice. But Landais can’t even figure out how to hold the viewer’s attention with a simple dialogue scene much less to evoke an atmosphere of creeping paranoia via surrealist dream imagery. As a filmmaker, Landais is trying to run before he’s even figured out how to walk. The result is a film that’s too busy tripping over itself to ever actually go anywhere.