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I LOVED THIS MOVIE!  Watching Bright Star, was like watching a sonnet unfold lavishly and luxuriously on the screen. It was beautifully filmed. Breathtaking. Written and directed by New Zealander, Jane Campion, it was masterful. The way she portrayed the romance between the poet John Keats and his neighbor, Fanny Brawne was exquisite. By the way, Campion remains the only female director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, an honor she achieved with The Piano in 1993.

Bright Star moves at a slow, soft rhythm that is deliberate. It gives you time to feel the characters’ emotions and to share in the process of falling in love. It gives you time to smell the purple heather that blankets the fields in the springtime and to feel the snow falling on your face in the winter. As I mentioned, the cinematography is exquisite. Breathtaking. (Thank you, cinematographer Greig Fraser!) Some of these images – narrow, cramped doorways, views from a room out a window into a field of luscious trees or falling snow, a butterfly flapping its wings in a glass jar, a breeze blowing through a billowing curtain to Fanny lying on her bed – create an overwhelming sense of emotion, as does the recitation of Keats’s imploring, yearning love letters to Fanny.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of the slow-burning love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne in 1818, which was halted when Keats succumbed to tuberculosis.  Australian actress, Abbie Cornish, plays Fanny Brawne in what could well be a career-defining role. She shoulders the story’s dramatic burden and she is fantastic. As Fanny Brawne, she is practical, grounded and forthright, and is initially more interested in sewing and high fashion than poetry – by Keats or anyone else. But gradually she becomes intrigued by him.

As Keats, Ben Whishaw certainly looks the part: pale, intense and very thin. Yet, he adds humor and a pleasant personality to the character, which makes the poet more rounded than a one-dimensional Romantic stereotype.

The film chronicles their relationship from start to finish: from 1818, when they were neighbors near Hampstead Heath, to his final departure from Britain to convalesce in Rome, Italy’s warm climate more than two years later.

At Hampstead Heath, Fanny lives with her widowed mother, Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox), and her well-behaved younger siblings Samuel (Thomas Brodie Sangster) and Margaret, known as Toots, (Edie Martin), who was absolutely adorable with her red curly hair and freckles.

Fanny’s place in society takes them to social events and balls where Fanny’s dance-card is always filled, although the glamorous Keats prefers not to dance. She has made a name, and money, for herself as a skilled maker of fashionable clothes, although the best friend of the coveted Keats, a burly writer named Brown (Paul Schneider), dismisses her as “the very well-stitched Miss Brawne.”

Fastidious and proud, Fanny feuds with Brown, who is over-protective of his genius friend, but she sends Toots, her little sister, to buy a copy of the poet’s latest collection, to see, as the child says, “if he’s an idiot or not.”

Once they fall in love, Cornish and Whishaw recite bits of Keats’s poetry throughout the movie which adds a romantic overture to the overall pace. The romance takes place in a formal environment, which was typical of the 1800s in England. Intimacy relied on kissed love letters and briefly touched hands. The way it was filmed made the intimacy more vital, with depth and emotion that’s often missing in the 21^st century. (When did you last receive a handwritten love letter or get the shivers when someone brushed your hand in the hallway?)  

The England depicted in the film is the one people are thinking of when they say they wish they were born during the time of the romantic poets. Only one scene in the picture shows the ugly underbelly of poverty in 1880s London, and for the rest it’s all picturesque houses and gorgeous gardens in Hampstead Village.

The entire cast is brilliant and Mark Bradshaw’s elegant score is pleasingly delicate.

You must see it. It will take your breath away.

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s-human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

John Keats

Note: Born in 1795, Keats published three books of poetry in his lifetime but was dismissed as a middle-class interloper by most critics.  He had no advantages of birth, wealth or education; he lost his parents in childhood, watched one brother die of tuberculosis and the other emigrate to America.  Poverty kept him from marrying the woman he loved.  And he achieved lasting fame only after his early death in 1821.  Yet grief and hardship never destroyed his passionate commitment to poetry.