Bright Star

Neither a conventional biopic nor your typical English costume drama – though it obviously has elements of both – Bright Star is more accurately described as a love story and a film about poetry.

Ben Whishaw is Keats, 23 years old in 1818; talented and dedicated to his vocation, but not yet successful and on the point of losing his younger brother Tom to the consumption that had also claimed his father.
 

When he meets Fanny (Abbie Cornish) she is still a teenager, a “stylish” creature (he is too serious for such fripperies). She cares little for poetry, but she is immediately attracted to the slender, sensitive, handsome young man.

Their initially cool relationship soon warms up: both are naturally tender, warm-hearted creatures. But their love faces severe obstacles: Keats, who is staying as a guest of the Brawne’s Hampstead neighbour Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) is in no financial position to marry anyone, and her mother (Kerry Fox) worries that their dalliance could effect Fanny’s own chances of finding a suitable husband. Further: Keats’ friend and colleague Brown takes an instant dislike of Fanny, whom he considers a regrettable distraction from their work. And then there’s the question of Keats’ health, which is frail.

Kiwi filmmaker Jane Campion has made several period pieces over the course of her career, most famously of course The Piano, but she is always at pains to make them seem vivid and immediate. She’s not one to sit back and photograph pretty decorum or admire the set dressing, she’s always looking for the emotional exchange – the facial expressions, the undercurrents, impulses and physical conditions – that animate a scene.

Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw have talked about Campion’s unusually lengthy rehearsal period of three weeks prior to the shoot, and how much of it consisted of expanding on scenes in Campion’s screenplay. Apparently they would improvise the hour before or after any particular scene, but that might mean sitting quietly and reading for 15 minutes, or drinking a cup of tea. The actors couldn’t say how this effected their performances, because when it came to shoot the film the dialogue hadn’t changed.

Yet if you watch the movie you can see precisely how this kind of background action and – if you’ll forgive the word – “behaviourism” enriches the film, whether it’s in the way Fanny makes herself at home in Brown’s study, or the happy game of statues Fanny and John play with her sister Toots on the sunny afternoon following their first kiss.

Campion is one of our most sensual directors, and even though this love affair never progressed beyond that kiss, in physical terms, she makes sure we understand the yearning and intensity of their ardour. It’s expressed in the curtain that billows into Fanny’s bedroom, and in the poet’s mad repose in the treetops, in the blossoming of the daffodils and in the key that Fanny hangs around her neck.

What has this got to do with poetry? Only everything. While Charles Brown fussily lectures the Brawne household on the poet’s need for solitude and silence as he pursues his muse, his verse remains academic and stultified. Keats, on the other hand, is inspired to compose perhaps the most beautiful lines ever written in the English language as he opens his heart to Fanny.

Campion – who first revealed a taste for poetry in her pretentious erotic thriller In the Cut – lets us savour these words, but she also has the confidence to match them with imagery of her own devising; to say, in effect, if we still value these poems three hundred years later on, let us also cherish the devotion that inspired them.