Bright Star

Written and directed by Jane Campion
Featuring Abbie Cornish, Ben Winshaw, Paul Schneider, Kerry Fox

Jane Campion, we’ve missed you so. Her weird Australian/British/New Zealand movies that always have long boring stretches before some ungodly and violent act usually involving blood are so poignant. In the Cut, her last film, featured a full-frontal Meg Ryan and a decapitated Jennifer Jason Leigh. Campion’s Bright Star, a gothic romance about romantic poet John Keats and his relatively sexless but emotional affair with an 18-year-old girl-next-door named Fanny Brawne, isn’t as good as The Piano (no one’s fingers get cut off – but you can’t have everything) and is too long for the modern moron to appreciate. Still, you get languid death and depressing poems, which isn’t half bad.

London-born Charlotte Gainsbourg won the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival tonight for her over-the-top performance as a grieving mother in the Lars Von Trier gorefest Antichrist.

As she was applauded after the recent Cannes screening of her gothic romance Bright Star, which tells of the romance between the 19th century romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, New Zealand director Jane Campion had a few things to say about how male-dominated Hollywood stinks. She's the only woman to have ever won the Cannes Palme d'Or for 1993's The Piano, and she's one of only 3 women directors who have films in competition at Cannes this year out of 20 (Andrea Arnold and Isabel Coixet are the others)

"The studio system is an old boy's system, and it's difficult for them to trust women to be capable," said Jane. "So good luck to my female friends in the competition. They represent half the population [who] gave birth to the whole world."

There are some poetic, gothic films being made (and have been many) about the lives of poets. Now, women seem to be hopping on that bandwagon! First we hear about director Jane Campion (In The Cut)'s production of Bright Star about romantic poet John Keats, and now Matthew Rhys plays the neurotic, death-obsessed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in The Edge Of Love, with Sienna Miller as wife Caitlin, Keira Knightley as his muse and Cillian Murphy as her soldier lover. It was written by Sharman Macdonald, Kiera Knightley's mother...