Content area
Full Text
Though based on Andrew Motion's biography of Keats, 'Bright Star' is iess a biopic of the poet, saps Graham Fuller, than a dreamy evocation of the spirit of his poetry. Overleaf, Nick James talks to director Jane Campion
At one point in Jane Campion's Bright Star, when Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw) have indicated their love for each other and sealed it with a kiss, Keats calmly sits under a tree and composes his 'Ode to a Nightingale', relayed as an interior monologue. In the context of their woozy, wounded, spellbound love, the opening couplet - "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk" - comes as a benediction. The film isn't numb or numbing, but there is a drowsiness to it. Scenes are seldom boldly defined, but bleed into each other as the relationship between Keats and Fanny slowly creeps forwards; it often seems like an indolent series of to-ings and fro-ings from home to home, with occasional forays onto Hampstead Heath. As a passive love story without sex or explicit expressions of desire, and with only one emotional irruption, the film is the soul of romantic hesitancy - and it could have been art-directed by Arthur Hughes, that most wistful of pre-Raphaelite painters. For all these reasons, and in contrast to rote literary costume dramas, Bright Starts - to these eyes and ears - a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
Campion was inspired to make the film by reading Andrew Motion's 1997 biography Keats. She was less interested in Keats' status as one of English Romanticism's big guns, however, than in the frustrations, indulgences and joys of a teenage girl - Fanny - who's constrained by the social conventions of the early 19th century and devoutly in love with a dying, penniless poet; a girl who's as spirited as Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, but doesn't talk their mannered onscreen talk. In Fanny's case, the path of true love doesn't run smooth because Keats' friend, collaborator and protector Charles Brown blocks it, treating her with suspicion and contempt. Played by the American actor Paul Schneider, Brown is Bright Star's equivalent of Sam Neill's Alisdair Stewart in...