Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 31

The Aspern Papers and The Lost Moment

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lobby cards and theatrical trailer each boasted something about the film that could
never apply to The Aspern Papers: “Never has love lived so close to terror.”
Both the tale’s and the film’s stories are told in the first person by an
American publisher who goes to great lengths—including the assumption of an
alias— to gain access to (a “footing” as James’s narrator puts it) and publish the
love letters from an American poet to Juliana Bordereau; in James’s tale, the poet
is called Jefrey Aspern and in the film, Jeffrey Ashton. However, what the film
does is to concentrate on an extra-textual, strange romance between the publisher
Lewis Venable and Juliana’s niece, Tina Bordereau; clearly, it is not James’s cold
tale of the failed literary scheme of a calculating “publishing scoundrel.”
In the film, Hal Mohr photographs Tina to be particularly glamorous when
she slips into her “Juliana” states. Unlike the rest of the gloomy house, the room
where Tina goes to enter into her Juliana spells is lit in high key. With her hair
down and with Juliana’s ring on her finger, Tina wears an elegant gown and plays
passionate piano sonatas that have a “pied-piper effect” on her kitten, which leads
Lewis to her. Suddenly aware that Tina is becoming the character of her aunt, the
recipient of Ashton’s letters, Lewis comments, “At that fearful, incredible moment
I knew I had plunged off a precipice into the past. And here was Juliana—real
beyond belief, beautiful, alluring, alive. How strange this was: Miss Tina who
walked dead among the living and living among the dead.”

Martin Gabel directs Robert Cummings and Susan Hayward in The Lost Moment.