A deeply felt tender love story imparts an intensity of feeling
Elise Nakhnikian
JANE Campion came up with idea for Bright Star while sitting with “a ragtag group of horses I used to like to sit with and read,” she told the audience after a Sept. 14 screening. When one of the horses delicately opened Campion’s bag with her hoof and sniffed it, Campion says: “I thought, that’s what I like, that kind of tenderness and gentleness. I wanted to make a story about that.”
So she did — and much more. This deeply felt, exquisitely tender love story is infused with a closely observed specificity that ushers us into her characters’ world, letting us share the extraordinary intensity of feeling that illuminates it.
Campion’s screenplay is her imagining of the story of the great English Romantic poet John Keats (a luminescent, gently charismatic Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a stylish young belle of the ball he loved until his death of consumption at age 25.
The movie begins in 1818, when Keats is 23 and Fanny just 16. Keats is already a published poet with a small following, but his work has been mostly badly reviewed and brings in almost no money. As a result, he lives in genteel poverty, dependent on the patronage of his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider.)
Keats’ poverty makes him unable to marry Fanny, since he is too honorable to break the rule that forbade a man from marrying if he could not support a wife. But he and Fanny ignore the rule that’s supposed to follow that: the one that says they must break off all relations. Instead, they ride a wave of love together until it crashes to an end with Keats’ death.
Like some of Keat’s own work, Bright Star is an intimate love story that contains a whole world. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser captures an astonishingly gorgeous England, starkly beautiful in the winter and bursting with colors and life in the springtime and summer. The yellow-white sunlight, the wind rustling through the leaves, and the shock of nature’s beauty are near hallucinogenic at times.
Campion makes you feel the pressures and pleasures of early 19th-century English society, but this is no stilted costume drama. It’s the story of two vivid individuals whose feelings and motivations feel as compelling and familiar as our own – if not more so. To create that sense of intimacy and emotional immediacy, Campion says, “I remembered Keats’s concept of negative capability — a capacity to stay with the mystery of life, without having to create any answers. I really wanted to have a sense of just being from the actors. Whenever people were relaxed and the work was coming from that place, that’s when it felt right.”
Keats’ poetry was one route into the ineffable mystery of life. Campion knew that a movie about poetry would be a hard sell. “People are allergic to poetry, kind of,” she said. “And they don’t just dislike it; they’re really aggressive about it.” But by weaving excerpts from Keats’ letters and poems and talk about poetry organically into the script (“poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery,” he tells Fanny), Campion makes poetry part of the action, using it to deepen the intensity of the emotions and capture that ineffable mystery.
Another conduit to a state of unselfconscious grace is Fanny’s much-younger sister, Toots. Edie Martin, the gravely graceful little sprite who plays her, doesn’t have many lines yet plays a significant role, attracting the camera like a magnet. Campion said the young actress was “an important talisman for us in many ways, because she embodied that quality of delicacy, just naturally. From the start, she had what the others were striving for, and they saw it.”
Campion also focuses a lot on the Brawne family’s cat, a black-and-white beauty played by Campion’s cat Topper that epitomizes the grace of living in the moment.
Bright Star’s impassioned but unconsummated love affair is a switch from the eroticism of Campion movies like The Piano and In the Cut. But this movie falls in line with an older Campion tradition: the creation of strong and complex female leads.
In her own day and for decades after her death, Fanny was attacked by people who painted her as shallow and insincere, a selfish flirt incapable of matching Keats’ depth of feeling or appreciating his genius. In later years, she was sometimes put on a pedestal, idealized as a sort of human muse. Campion rescues her from both forms of erasure, creating her most self-assured heroine yet.
The Fanny imagined by Campion and embodied by Cornish is strong and self-confident, forthright and honest, competent and kind. In other words, a compelling character — and a great romantic lead.
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Rated PG for thematic elements, some sensuality, brief language and incidental smoking