fri 29/03/2024

Bright Star | reviews, news & interviews

Bright Star

Bright Star

Young romantics: John Keats and Fanny Brawne in an ode to passion

This poetic romance starts with a surprisingly prosaic image: an enormous close-up of a needle plying its trade. Surreal and (it will turn out) remarkably resonant, it sums up the director's oblique way of looking at the everyday. At first sight a decorous literary costume drama, Jane Campion's telling of the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne offers us a total immersion in a world that's both familiar and fascinating, intimate and infinitely strange.

John and Fanny (played by Ben Whishaw and the fast-rising Australian actress Abbie Cornish, pictured below) met in 1818 when he was 23 and she was 18. They were living cheek by jowl in a small Hampstead house divided into two dwellings. On one side, Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown. On the other, Fanny, her mother and two younger siblings. She was the ultimate girl-next-door.

Their liaison was eyed with disapproval in both households. "He has no income and no living," laments Mrs Brawne (Kerry Fox), in a line that could have been penned by Jane Austen. Fanny was hardly a fortune-hunter, since Keats was penniless and sickly (he would die of tuberculosis three years later). Nonetheless, on the other side of the dividing wall, Brown guarded his friend like a ferocious Scottish Cerberus. In a tart-tongued early exchange, Keats (who was by no means instantly smitten) calls Fanny a "minx-tress" while Brown remarks that "she only knows how to flirt and sew."

There's a not-so-covert sexual tension in the Brawne-Brown antipathy. He admires her amber eyes; she, in return, describes his flatly as "suitcase-brown" (he later sends her a Valentine joking about it). The abrasive Scot is a bit of a cad, who makes a maid pregnant and lets Keats down in his hour of need. But it's also ambiguous to start with whether Fanny will be the poet's celestial muse or a fatal distraction.

The needle announces her addiction to fashion, viewed with suspicion by Brown as the sign of an irredeemably trivial mind. Slightly dumpy and verging on plain, with severe scraped-back brown hair, she pours all her energy and imagination into flamboyant dresses and huge, high poke bonnets, with a penchant for soft red and a mastery of intricate pleating that makes Issey Miyake look like a rank amateur. Why, she is the proud possessor of the only triple-pleated mushroom collar in North London.

The costumes Fanny devises and sews are extraordinary (they are designed by Janet Patterson, Campion's long-time collaborator).  Keats wrote sublime poetry but she is allowed her own modest means of self-expression. And like the butterflies which she hatches in her bedroom, in one bizarre interlude, she emerges from her cocoon in the course of the film. Campion elects to see the story not through Keats' eyes (and his letters reveal an obsessive slant to his passion) but through her steady amber gaze. It's a rash gambit since, while Brawne preserved her lover's letters for posterity, her own ones to him were destroyed. But the writer-director persuasively draws on secondary sources such as Keats' writing and Andrew Motion's biography of the poet to find her a voice.

The Piano, Campion's biggest previous success, chronicled a lavish, saturnine romantic agony, but Bright Star is much more luminous in both look and tone. Keats is not above the odd prank or teasing remark and their relationship is shown as playful and intensely erotic, no matter that it remained unconsummated before the poet went off to die in Italy.

It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of an needle than for a director to make a good film about poetry: the introspective, serious scratching of quill on parchment seems especially ill-suited to big-screen entertainment. Egregious failures have included po-faced attempts to dramatise the travails of Sylvia Plath (Sylvia), and of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine (Total Eclipse).

Meanwhile the more enjoyable ventures adopt their own poetic licence: Lord Byron and Percy Shelley treat themselves to an outrageous kitsch orgy in Ken Russell's Gothic, and the rumblings of the French Revolution inspire the young soul rebels Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Julien Temple's Pandemonium. Those films, though, the verse feels like a reluctant afterthought: these characters are proposed as of interest for their outrageous antics not for their literary achievements. In Bright Star, poetry is cardinal and omnipresent - up to and including the closing credits.

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