The Lost Moment

105-year-old Juliana

A flop redeemed by time, The Lost Moment was too gothic, too excessive for 1947 but here in the 2020s it fits quite snugly in alongside the likes of The Vourdalak, Uninvited, The Girl with the Needle, The Maid or either of the recent takes on Nosferatu. An adaptation of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, it tells the story of a publisher posing as a writer inveigling himself into the Venice palazzo of ancient Juliana Bordereau, the onetime love of famous poet Jeffrey Ashton (as the Byron/Shelley composite Jeffrey Aspern is called here), hoping to lay his hands on the love letters Ashton left behind. It’ll be the publishing event of the century, … Read more