Bright Star

Director: Jane Campion
Starring: Ben Wishaw, Abbie Cornish Kerry Fox and Paul Schneider
Distributor: Hopscotch Films
Runtime: 119 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011

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Rating notes: Mild themes

This background is by way of introducing Jane Campion’s rather quiet and intimate portrait of Keats’ last years and his love for and engagement to Fanny Brawne. Apart from a glimpse of Keats’ coffin being carried across the Spanish Steps in Rome (where his room can be visited still), everything takes place on Hampstead Hill near the London of 1819, the woods at the back of the house in a pretty spring and a snow-clad winter but, mainly, interiors. Keats was a poet of interiors, of musings.

Which certainly does not make for a slambang action show for the perpetual-texters or the internet surfers. But, it would not be a bad thing for an audience to slow down if it could and simply be with people who lived at a slower pace and had time to feel and reflect. For those who do go, I hope they don’t make that instant dash for exits as soon as final credits appear as throughout these credits, Ben Wishaw recites Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale.

Texts of poems are used throughout and the title comes from the beginning of a sonnet Keats wrote for Fanny.

Jane Campion’s films are varied but they all take on a female perspective. Fanny Brawne and her love for Keats are the principal focus here. Abbie Cornish gives a vigorously romantic performance, embodying the more liberating attitudes and behaviour in an immediate post-Jane Austen era. She is down-to-earth, a creative dressmaker who is attracted to the wispy Keats. He is played by that thinnest of actors, Ben Whishaw, with a melancholy, which Fanny almost drives out of him as he discovers love and affection.

To spark some drama, a great deal of attention is given to Keats’ writing partner, Charles Brown (a vigorous performance from Paul Schneider) and Fanny not concealed dislike of and disdain for hm. Kerry Fox (once Campion’s An Angel at my Table) plays Fanny’s mother.

This is a very refined film, a picture of gentle passion for Keats and passion taking possession of her for Fanny. It is a tribute to the quiet genius of Keats’ imagination and love of language.