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.
Fanny Brawne (played by Abbie Cornish) is kind of an 1818 Sorority girl – fairly vapid, into fashion, and rich. For some reason (because she has a vagina and is semi-hot) the young poet John Keats falls in love with her. Keats is a deadbeat who lives off of his friend Mr. Brown, Fanny’s next-door neighbor and has no job. His dying brother lives in a shitty apartment in London, and he visits him on occasion only to burst into tears as soon as he is back at Mr. Brown’s comfortable suburban duplex. Keats is also hot (played by Ben Winshaw) in a kind of musician-way. Mr. Brown and Keats spend all their time sitting in Mr. Brown’s living room trying to think up bad poetry, which they are not very successful at. Fanny scoffs at them and at their poetry, but not before noticing how hot Keats is. Inevitably, Keats pulls the whole ‘I’m so dark and tortured’ thing, and Fanny, having almost no other guys to look at, decides she’s in love with him.
Ben Winshaw as a hot version of Keats
Abbie Cornish as 18-year-old Fanny Brawne
What happens next is what always happens when you date one of these guys – he is constantly disappointing Fanny, doesn’t write, and never lifts a finger to try to make a dime so he can actually marry her and like, be with her, for reals. He’s happy to float along, getting her hopes up that they’ll be together, only to totally ignore her for weeks at a time while he’s off in ‘Italy’. Ugh, I really just can’t stand Keats and I want to shake Fanny and tell her ‘No, he’s not worth it! He’ll suck your youth away and leave you with nothing because he’s a narcissist!’ But you know what Fanny would say? She’s just say I was wrong. GOD. I fucking hate this guy.
So, back to Campion. Anyway, Keats and Fanny spend some awesomely-shot days together out on the Moors, or whatever the fuck those are called, waxing about true love and poetry, carelessly holding hands and picking flowers. Then Keats gets sick. He gets very sick. He starts coughing blood (not enough for my taste) and must leave for Italy. His friends purchase him a ticket, and he leaves carelessly leaving Fanny behind. No matter how much Keats may have suffered as a dying man with tuberculosis, the pain he caused Fanny by his absence and carelessness is a thousand times worse. I’m surprised she didn’t die of anguish.
Throughout all this Edgar Allan Poe-ness, Campion manages to make an extremely sad movie, albeit slow (fuck it, those were slow times) that really bring out some of the better embodiments of Keats’s actual poetry. She never misses a step to make something natural and relatable, or awkward and uncomfortable, in a very adept and controlled way. Despite how pretentious the subject matter is, Campion never makes it feel so, in fact, she’s clarifying and humanizing individuals who have been romanticized throughout the years, while allowing them the glory of the truth of their feelings and writings untarnished. Fanny and John feel real – that’s as much a testament to the actors as it is to Campion herself, but Campion’s camera lens is the main attraction. She knows how to make things look the way they should, the way the story demands, while maintaining a somber and realistic tone throughout. She makes the normal hail storm or summer cloud seem fantastic by comparison to the everyday she also captures, and her characters fall into place so gorgeously in the alternate worlds she crates.
Fanny sitting in flowers
John Keats sitting in a tree. Lots of people sit in stuff in this film.
Bright Star is slow, sad, and romantic. It will almost tear your heart out and make you doubt whether Keats was anything but a petty player who mooched off friends so he wouldn’t have to get a job – but it also makes you crave love and feel agonizingly sad at the thought of losing it.
Rating: (4 out of 5):
