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Ben Wishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny in Bright Star |
Stellar quality
in poetic affair
BRIGHT STAR
Directed by Jane Campion
Certificate PG
THIS bio-pic charts the love between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, his next-door neighbour in his Hampstead home.
She was the inspiration for his terrific love poem, Bright Star, and provided him with romantic distractions as he penned some of the loveliest poetry the English language has to offer. But his time in Hampstead was to be cut short: he fell ill, travelled to Italy hoping a change in climate would provide a cure, and died, aged just 24.
You can see what attracted writer and director Jane Campion to the tale: the dashing young poet’s first love, with a terrible tragedy waiting at the end. It has the ingredients and works well enough, but the stifling, uptight atmosphere of the period and its attitude towards love seeps into the plot and dialogue, and at times you may feel yourself shaking a fist at all concerned, urging them to pull themselves together.
At first, it is quite hard to warm to poor Fanny. She spends her time stitching intricate (and to a 21st-century eye, ugly) outfits and looking suitably morose, as if the fire in her hearth is permanently out and no huffing and puffing from the sensitive Keats will ignite it.
Then she falls for the poet, apparently touched by his attitude towards his soon-to-die brother Tom. According to the film, she had previously thought him uncouth, that poets were ruffians and she wanted as little to do with him and his fellow poet chum Brown as possible. By the time Fanny’s mum and Keats’s friend Brown realise how attached the young pair have become, their love is in full bloom and there is little they can do to stop it – although why it appears to have been considered destructive is not made in any way clear.
There are also some rather whimsical pithy moments that grate.
It doesn’t help that the script veers from reciting some of Keats’s timeless verses, to basic, badly delivered ‘allos and goodbyes in a cod-Georgian style that plagues so many period dramas.
Abbie Cornish as Fanny and Ben Wishaw as Keats have a certain amount of chemistry together, but you hardly warm to the pair as their circumstances made me think I would.
However, some parts are quite lovely. I particularly enjoyed a sequence that shows what Campion believes 19th-century Hampstead looked like.
For the New Journal viewer, it is a quick trip back in time. And Keats’s poems are nice to hear read by actors – it’s a welcome distraction from the plodding pace of the affair. |
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