Rowing With The Wind

This English-language Spanish production is a fairly successful examination of the "haunted summer" of 1816 wherein the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her sister Claire Clairmont, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori intertwined to produce Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic gothic novel Frankenstein. This same material inspired Ken Russell's overheated horror film GOTHIC (1987). ROWING WITH THE WIND opens with a beautifully photographed sequence--accompanied by Ralph Vaughan Williams' haunting "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis"--in which Mary Shelley (McInnerny) writes on board a decrepit schooner as it drifts through massive ...