Film review: Bright Star

Published on Thursday 5 November 2009 17:58

BRIGHT STAR (PG) **** DIRECTED BY: JANE CAMPION STARRING: ABBIE CORNISH, BEN WHISHAW, PAUL SCHNEIDER

WITH Bright Star, Jane Campion has crafted a sedate, intelligent and quietly sensuous film about John Keats (Ben Whishaw) that manages to get at the tortured nature of the artist without indulging in tortured artist clichs of its own. Instead it suggests through spare, elliptical scenes, carefully considered performances and gorgeous – though never distractingly so – visuals, the extent to which Keats resisted the allure of love for the sake of his art and how impossible a task that proved to be when faced with a kindred spirit like Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), the young woman who became the love of his short life. Brawne wasn't a poet, she was a seamstress whose family lived next door to the penniless Keats in Hampstead, but Campion and Cornish present her as a credibly creative mind who connects with Keats on a more sublime level and works hard to decipher him through his work. As Fanny competes for his attentions with Keats's Scottish friend and benefactor Charles Armitage Brown (played by Paul Schneider), Campion uses their relationship to illuminate in unstuffy fashion the social mores and position of women in the period, as well as the power Keats's words had.