Directed by Jane Campion. 119 minutes.
Starring Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox and Paul Schneider. Released by Apparition.
Rarely is a film so chaste and yet so sensual as Jane Campion’s lush and lovely Bright Star. The film, which is the director’s first in six years, tells the tragic love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, but there are few heaving bossoms to be had nor is there much frolicking in the forest. The film’s romance – and there is much of that – stems more from the unconsummated love between the poet, who died from tuberculosis in his early 20s, and seamstress Brawne, as well as the film’s lovely visuals, which complement the film’s spoken verse with a worldly poetry that can be found in the flutter of a butterfly or the beauty of a field full of flowers swaying in the wind. In fact, Campion films Bright Star as if the world itself were a living, breathing poem.
In the film, Keats (a frail Ben Whishaw) lives next door to Fanny (Abbie Cornish, in a very strong performance) and the Brawnes with his obnoxious fellow poet Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), who both finds Fanny as an irritant that detracts from the attention he seeks in Keats as well as a potential conquest with whom he flirts and, occassionally, insults. Fanny knows little about poetry, spending her time primarily on sewing the outrageous décor in which she struts around. But something about Keats draws her in. She can’t quite endorse his book of poetry, but she tells him that the beginning of his “Endymion” is nearly “perfect.” Brawne decides to take up studying the art form, but we never really know whether she gains a love for poetry, or just Keats. Regardless, Brown is not convinced and is a bit skeptical when Brawne claims to have read the entire works of Keats, Lord Byron and “The Odyssey” in a week’s time.
The film plays out Keats and Brawne’s story of a love unfulfilled. It sees Brawne as the inspiration for Keats’ work, as well as Keats being Brawne’s reason for being. But the world of Bright Star is not enclosed as it might sound. In fact, Brawne’s family, including her mother (Kerry Fox), young brother and sister, Toots, as well as the arrogant Brown, are given a fair amount of screen time. It is easy to fall into the film’s rhythm, which is both slow and hypnotic, due to Campion’s decision to establish a rapport between the film’s characters, rather than create an isolated world engulfed in the two lead’s not-quite love affair.
This film is a thing of visual beauty. There are moments that are among the most visually rapturous I’ve seen this year – a field of purple flowers in which Brawne and her sister sprawl out, Fanny lying on a bed as the wind whips through her dress, long shots of characters chasing one another through the autumnal and wintered grounds near the Brawne’s home and stones creating a ripple in a pond. Campion interchanges these haunting moments of beauty with near-drab interiors of characters fumbling through the darkened Brawne home, but even these sequences add to the picture their own sort of visual splendor.
As I mentioned before, the film is extremely sensual without including a single sex scene. A sequence in which Fanny verbally spars with Brown in front of Keats (to impress him?) has a certain charge to it and several scenes in which the ailing Keats and his love read poems to one another in a quiet room is more romantic and erotic than most scenes in which actors perform sans clothing. Call it aural sex. So many directors refuse to make sincere, earnest films about romantic love because, I don’t know, they think it’s dated to make films that take the subject seriously. Films within this genre – period pieces with a romantic twist – often veer into sentimentality or, on the other end of the spectrum, stuffiness, but Bright Star never comes close to either. Its power can be attributed to not only its visual indulgences and serene beauty, but also its restraint.