Jane Campion's Bright Star

Perhaps it will not come entirely amiss in a blog so affirmedly passéist as this that we can speak of films over a decade old? Especially in times of confinement when people are catching up on what they might have missed at the box office? This certainly had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it run.


The life of John Keats reads like a series of tropes and clichés about poets and Romantic (and romantic) ones at that (and I have read, I believe, five different biographies of the man, as children will request on repeat a particular tale which their minds attempt to grapple with): The early death, the consumption, the handsome lead and lovely lady of unconsommated love. These are not fashionable topics. And I am reminded in this of Barthes’ Fragments of Lover’s Discourse, which takes on the impossibility of speaking of love unironically in the world that is our own. Barthes says (or implies, I have hazy memories of his words) that we must turn to the past to tell an unselfconcious love story (though Keats himself thought his own time to be inimical to love – “That ye may love in spite of beaver hats” )


If anyone could rise to this challenge it would be Jane Campion. And yet- commercial success is not the hallmark of art house cinema and art house this very much is.


So we should not be surprised that this heartbreakingly beautiful, unapologetically visually, luscious, film should not have met with much impact beyond a certain circle of critics. It was written of and spoken of, but not much watched it would seem.


I would like here to speak of its beauties.


By speaking of a weakness first : one, for me, was Campion’s choice to take all of Keats’ dialogue as excerpts from his letters. This led to a patchwork sort of disjointedness in his dialogue, though perhaps more disconcerting to one who had read those letters (how they affected the ear for one who had not read them I can’t say) – and yet Campion’s idea here is a respectable one, even if it didn’t carry off as intended. What hand would dare to put words in the mouth, to create out of whole cloth, the speech of one of the English language’s greatest poets who had achieved that status before dying at 25 years old. I can imagine being a director and thinking instead to let his own diction shine and mining his correspondance for the true to life feel of his breath and speech. Ultimately flawed, it was a noble effort.


But then there are the visuals that offset this flaw –not to even address the fine acting of the visually appealing stars Abby Cornish and Ben Whishaw, whose faces and bodies seem perfectly cast as these star crossed lovers: a bedroom full of butterflies, a letter read in a field of bluebells, the chromatic ache of a a pinkred dress paired with the otherworldly blue of a man’s coat as the lovers walk through the wood. Such scenes were again part and parcel of this barefaced “poeticalness” that I think embarasses many a modern viewer, as we cannot seem to get past our own equivalent of beaver hats.





More praise is due to the film insofar as the director of The Piano has told this story from the point of view of the much maligned Fanny Brawne. Keats’ friends held little appreciation for the young woman, and her name has often been handed down in a kind of infamy of she who tormented the poet in his few short years on earth. Campion does not take this tack and returns to this very, very young person all her humanity as a 19 year old in an impossible situation of a secret engagement with no marriage on the horizon for lack of funds, lack of support, lack of health.

I loved seeing her sewing her improbable frocks – her own “work” as a woman’s sewing projets were generically referred to in the nineteenth century. And this work of self expression, however ephemeral (like the butterflies filling her room) was interestingly juxtaposed with Keats more “respectable” and “eternal” work of men, of writing, again in that era’s perspective, his creation of words that will last centuries when all her dresses were to be dust. And so again this use of his own words as counterpart to a recreation of what she must have sewn and worn. The one vanishes the other stays.

I would like to think that in Campion's Bright Star she has managed to preserve the both of them for us, for the lovers, in spite of beaver hats.