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With the hues of amber and persimmon veining our Chinese elm's leaves and pinot grapes bursting, overdue for harvest, I'm always reminded of John Keats' ode, "To Autumn": "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness/Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;/Conspiring with him how to load and bless/With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run . . . " Jane Campion's latest film "Bright Star" not only illuminates Keats' poetic proclivities but his insecurities and lovelorn intentions, intentions reciprocated by his neighbor Fanny Brawne.
"Bright Star", nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, is a love story that transcends epoch or age; it is both tumultuous and tender, much like young, ludic love itself. Set in 1818 in the outskirts of London, Campion provides us with a lush rendering of the pastoral and domestic scenes of Regency England. We are first introduced to the Brawne family, a middle-class family whose patriarch has recently passed away; their mother now the head of the household. Mrs. Brawne (the excellent Kerry Fox) indulges her three children particularly the clever, witty, and outspoken eighteen-year old Fanny. Fanny--an accomplished seamstress and a fashionista of her provincial town--dons elaborate clothing, costumes ill-fitting of Hampstead Heath's mundane milieu. Fanny (the Oscar-worthy Abbie Cornish), in one of her first encounters with her new neighbor, the much embattled and impoverished poet John Keats, preens, proud that she has created the first triple-pleated mushroom collar in all of Hampstead. In socializing with Keats, she remarks that the quality she most enjoys in writers is wit. Keats is not impressed: "Wit," he grimaces. "Things that make you start, without making you feel."
With this challenge, Fanny expresses her interest in learning poetry although she is forthright that poetry is difficult for her to not only understand but to its purpose and purposefulness as well. Obviously Fanny's interest in poetry lessons with Mr. Keats (Ben Wishaw) is because she is interested in Mr. Keats and not necessarily Homer's "Odyssey" or John Milton's "Paradise Lost." Yet Fanny, ever earnest and hopeful in her romantic feelings towards the waning poet, reads his "Endymion", quoting his poetic verse to him, showing the seriousness of her devotion to him as both man and poet. Keats is besotted, bewitched and he is unsure of her; she is a flirt after all and he criticizes her for those flirtatious ways, calling her "minx." Her flirtatious manner is not lost on his friends either particularly his roommate, Mr. Charles Brown (the always superb Paul Schneider) who argues with Fanny with much gusto. There is a triangulation of sorts here although Mr. Brown is by far more smitten with Keats' lyrical mastery and his subtlety of rhyme than with the earthy and obvious charms of Miss Brawne.
Jane Campion's use of texture--tactile and visual--brings Regency England to life, both vibrant and subdued in its palette. She and cinematographer Greg Fraser are painterly in their blocking and shooting of scenes, a dash of Vermeer's brush if you will. This has always been Campion's signature style and her genius. This detail to texture imbues tension and relief to the film's narrative arc. She wrote the screenplay, relying heavily on Sir Andrew Motion's 1997 biography of Keats. The dialogue is deliberate and deliberating; the pace is at first quite slow (this is one of the criticisms that the film has received from other reviewers), plodding even but arguably reflective of the temporality of Regency England. More importantly, this pacing is reflective of the Romantic poets' brooding and musings, the lifeblood to their craft.
The acting is spot-on although I did find Ben Whishaw's portrayal of Keats at times slightly strained but nonetheless, a Keats whom I imagined in my youth, reading "Ode to a Nightingale", enchanted. Abbie Cornish deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Lead Actress and Paul Schneider is deserving of a nomination of Best Supporting Actor for his turn as the disgruntled and narcissistic poet Charles Brown. The tragic ending of the film is heartbreaking yet tempered in the ethereal beauty of Fanny's oration of Keats' words in "Bright Star" (a poem that is believed to have been written for Miss Brawne): "Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art--/Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,/And watching, with eternal lids apart . . .
This film, like Miss Brawne, is a bright star. See it.
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