Los Fantasmas de Gabriel
2014 · 35m · España
Directed by Emilie Bellia
Genres: biography, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, theatrical
An adaptation of the life of the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a drama set in late nineteenth-century England, in which Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics predominate and in which the feminine duality between the mother-woman and the femme fatale will have a leading role.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Pre-Raphaelite biography dressed in period drag—competent, sure, but Bellia's playing it respectfully when the real subversion would've been to crack open Rossetti's mythology instead of genuflecting to it.
Bellia demonstrates formal control in her treatment of Rossetti's aesthetic legacy, positioning the film within the lineage of literary biography cinema while the theatrical melancholia and feminine archetypes provide a considered visual argument about desire and artistic obsession.
The decision to filter late-Victorian England through Pre-Raphaelite painterly language—those chromatic choices, the composed frames—is sound, but at 35 minutes the film doesn't quite commit hard enough to a single formal conceit that would make this more than a handsome period piece.