Linus Roache (''The Wings of the Dove'') plays the anguished, hot-blooded Coleridge and John Hannah (''Four Weddings and a Funeral'') is the comparably repressed Wordsworth. The two poets in the film, which opens today at the Village East (Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village), are admirably portrayed. Boyce bring subtle ridicule to Wordsworth's peripatetic dictation to Dorothy, and they ably transmit the hellish torture and triumph of Coleridge's nightmare journeys into creativity. Temple from time to time slashes the pale blue sky over his England with the diagonal white contrail of a jet aircraft.Ĭlearly the filmmakers' sympathies lie with Coleridge, whose fevered mind, stoked with the tincture of opium called laudanum, gave the world ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' and ''Kubla Khan.'' To Wordsworth they ascribe not only base motives but also an often earthbound literary sensibility elevated by Dorothy, his perceptively critical proto-feminist sister, whose passion for a receptive Coleridge is inhibited by his marriage, his fatherhood and occasional untimely intrusions.įilms like ''Pandaemonium,'' in which a visual medium grapples with literary art, often founder in their depiction of creation, but Mr. In graceful underscoring as he makes telling visual and narrative use of the beauteous landscape of lakes and shores and hills and fields and villages that nourished the imagination of these poets, Mr. So, working from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce (''Hilary and Jackie''), the director, Julien Temple (''Absolute Beginners''), infuses his film with elements of political rebelliousness colored by the French Revolution, government surveillance and repression, utopianism, scientific innovation, respect for nature, drug use and popular stardom of the sort that prompts the press to clamor and young women to swoon. Literate and handsome, ''Pandaemonium'' examines the relationship between the English romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) as a drama of friendship, rivalry, ambition, betrayal and political intrigue in an era of recognizable parallels to recent decades.
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