Bright Star

Bright Star (2009), dir. Jane Campion

A film review on this website. Whatever next.

It is the habit of film reviewers to remark upon the 'special effects', the tawdry and expensive cheap thrills that beset the blockbuster genre. But one can be sustained by mere rapturous photography alone when a film is such a banquet for our tired eyes as Jane Campion's account of John Keats and his most tragical dalliance with Fanny Brawne.

The film is Janeite(*) in decorum with the recurrent images redolent of Vermeer's painting as ladies doing stitching or poets reading are caught in the light that filters through windows.

The countenance of Ben Wishaw is more comely than required to represent the poet but it is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone appearing in a film needs to be more handsome than those who do not. The more dastardly Mr. Brown, played by Paul Schneider, provides the angelic Keats with a heavily counterpointed opposite for dramatic and sometimes comic effect. Otherwise I believe the film to be accurate enough in its fidelity to truth and so, in this case, with sufficient reference to the texts, truth is indeed beauty and beauty is truth.

Sad, of course, and there is some inevitability in the dreadful ending but death was in life for these purveyors of poetic langour and life wasn't quite beauteous enough for them. So it may never be counted among the litany of most profound or admirable of the all too few films that I have seen but it was a fine and gorgeous thing to see and I can do more than commend it to you.

* I only once ever saw the word 'Janeite' in print, so I looked it up and found it meant 'pertaining to Jane Austen' but it isn't in either of the dictionaries I have here.