Print
E-mail
At the movies, the greatest love stories are too often the love stories that are not allowed to happen. Think of the frustrated lovers in David Lean's Brief Encounter – Trevor Howard's casual hand pressed gently on the shoulder of Celia Johnson in a tea room at a train station, that hand leaden with all the weight of the world and a love that goes unfilled. Or, more recently, the reluctant lovers in Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and the tingle of those few whispered words from Bill Murray into the ear of Scarlett Johansson, words withheld from the aching hearts of the audience.
In Bright Star, the deeply touching, poetic film from The Piano's Jane Campion, it is the promise of a woman's body – "all of it" – to a dying young man, and that promise which goes unfulfilled, that delivers a kick to the heart. The camera watches them from above, their bodies forming the unity of a circle, though they are only lovers in spirit. Yet Campion's film delivers a defibrillated blast of electricity to that thing we call the romantic film – a genre in cardiac arrest.
Bright Star is a romantic drama about the three-year frustrated love affair between the doomed young poet John Keats and his muse, Fanny Brawne. It begins in 1818 and centres around Fanny, a young clothes designer who lives with her widowed mother (Kerry Fox) and a brother and sister. She is played by Abbie Cornish with a face clear and bright and a personality as vital as a spring morning. She also has a tongue forged like a rapier. Keats' best friend, the sarcastic Mr Brown (played by Paul Schneider with an amusing belligerence), is carved regularly into bite-sized pieces. "My stitching has more merit than your two scribblings put together," she tells him. "And I can make money from it." Ouch.
The repartee is razor-edged and Fanny is a lady to be reckoned with. But her poise is less certain in the company of Keats (Ben Whishaw), who, underneath a raffish stubble and silent charm, exudes a gaze that peers into her soul. Soon, she's sending her siblings off to buy a book of his poetry to see if he's "an idiot or not". Then she's lying on her bed reading it. Next thing, she might as well be giving him her phone number – she stitches him a pillow slip. He kisses it tenderly. She bites her lip. Game on.
Only it isn't. Campion, with astonishing, poetic rigour, and an eye for texture amid the soft focus of the camera, zeroes in on the restraint. In Brief Encounter and Lost in Translation, it was marriage that stood in the way of love. Here, it is propriety and prosperity. Keats, a poet who gets an ungenerous time from critics, lives off the generosity of Mr Brown. So he cannot propose marriage and hence we enter a fevered spell of emotions.
If Bright Star is as renewing to the genre of romance as romantic affection is to a loveless life, to call it a romance would be to ignore the power of its poetry. Keats talks about his art as if diving into a lake, not to swim to the other side, but to experience what it is like to be in that lake. Campion's film does just that. She creates for us the experience of what it is like to feel, in all its seasons, the various stages of love and its see-saw of emotions – the swoon, the sting, and the suffering. If there is a shot more delicate and gently moving in the movies this year than that of Fanny, falling back onto her bed as a breeze billows lace curtains towards her, as if love were blowing a tender kiss upon her brow, I'll hang my quill up right now.
Campion makes use of the seasons with the full abandon of a Romantic poet. The fields bloom riotous in the spring of love. Fanny's room fills with the flutter of butterflies as if her heart were taking wing. When Keats returns after an absence, he does so through a flowered field.
But it is not till his death from tuberculosis that Campion moves in on the emotions of her audience with the surety of the kill. She captures Fanny's pain in a way that makes bow-knots of your gut. You watch Fanny step out through a doorway, much like John Ford in The Searchers, into a canvas of snow and it's a haunting, beautiful image – full of the winter of loss and frozen emotion. But Campion follows it with a lyrical tracking shot, the young woman wrapped in widow black and the beauty of Keats' poems swimming in her head amidst the forlorn winter of her own heart.
There is danger of wading into cliché when making period films about doomed romance. And I had my suspicions watching Keats, dying of consumption, but running about in the rain without a coat, just like Michael Furey, the young man who died for Gabriel's wife in Joyce's short story 'The Dead'. But there is a sincerity here, a depth of sensitivity, that steers us clear.
Bright Star, a reference from the sonnet 'Bright Star! Would I were Stedfast as Thou Art', which Keats wrote in honour of Fanny, does justice to the romantic heights of his poetry. It is that rare thing at the movies – a genuine exploration of feeling. It is a work of art.
del.icio.us
digg
Facebook
Google
Bravo Mr. Lynch. You reviewers pen captures this film just as surely as the film itself captured the essence of poetry of love. "A defibrillated blast of electricity",indeed!