The Aspern Papers

The Aspern Papers, brief as it is, needed more of a lightness of touch; if you weigh down melodrama too much, it dies.

Landais has made a version of Aspern that is too often uncertain and unconvincing despite the good work of his female stars. And when the actresses leave the screen and the film ventures into ill-advised flashback territory, things get shakier still.

Although he’s playing a man of letters, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers swans around the film’s settings with a pout that suggests that he’s waiting for his cue to sing “Please allow me to introduce myself.”

It’s when Landais departs from the original, or has a bright idea for expanding on it, that the movie’s troubles begin.

Landais certainly brought little cinematic verve to The Aspern Papers, telling the story largely in turgid literary voiceover lifted directly from the original source material.

Passion is spoken of and clumsily envisioned in The Aspern Papers, but not a drop of it is felt.

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.