Bright Star

I got the DVD of Bright Star as a get well present while recovering in hospital from a major spinal operation recently. Looking at the cover, it looked like my kind of movie, a romance and a period drama. Last Sunday, I watched it and was very impressed overall. It is a beautiful movie and competently directed and acted, but two things stop it from shining more than it could have done.

One is some of the dialogue. Not all mind, most of it is wonderfully poetic and moving, but then there is some of the more abstract language that feels more stilted and not as feasible to understand. My main problem is the pace, which throughout is rather slow making one or two scenes in the middle act a tad dull.

However, as a depiction of the joy of first love and the heart break that succeeds it, Bright Star is very effective. The final twenty minutes are heart-breaking, and the mood of the film compliments Keat's sensuous style beautifully. Jane Campion directs very competently, with each scene and season moving pretty much seamlessly to the next.

Bright Star has a beautiful, moving story, beautifully told and tells the story of Keats, his love and his beautiful poetry lovingly. The film looks exquisite, with lovely photography and authentic costumes and the painterly, watercolour-like scenery is spellbinding. The music adds to the poignancy, the background scoring is effective without overpowering and I liked the use of the Mozart piece if not the arrangement and how it was performed, some of the singing lacked support and the piece works much more as a chamber work.

The acting is fine and appropriately understated. Ben Whishaw is dashing and compellingly misty-eyed, while Paul Schneider adds a slight touch of menace and perhaps even realism to the picture. It was Abbie Cornish though who gave the best performance, one minute she is appropriately stern, another minute she is very poignant.

All in all, a lovely movie, could have been more, but one movie I would see again willingly. 7.5/10 Bethany Cox

When watching Jane Campion's affectionate account of the final months of John Keats's brief life I could not but ponder on the precariousness of human existence even at such relatively short time ago as the early years of the nineteenth century. Ahead were those advances in medical science that certainly have enabled this octogenarian to watch several hundred wonderful films rather than a small handful. It is the ephemeral nature of experience that tugs at the heartstrings, a romance with everything going for it, cut short because a cure now available simply was not there. "Bright Star" lovingly conveys the "carpe diem" of the all too brief relationship of the young poet with his very near neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish instinctively express the emotions of an affair they know to be all too short in a way that reminds that great romantic cinema is far from dead. As if this were not enough, Campion's work is terrific on period detail. A shot very near the beginning depicting a Hampstead village landscape with white sheets of washing flapping in the foreground is breathtakingly beautiful. And this just one of many. There are moments of exquisite tenderness such as the scene where Keats comments on the rosebud complexion of Toots, Fanny's much younger sister. We are never far from the poetry itself which is oft-quoted even to the extent of providing a background to the final credits thus rendering the usual rushed exit from the half lit "dream palace" all but impossible. There is a moment shortly towards the end when Fanny, hearing of Keats's death collapses in a paroxysm of grief. As moving as similar moments in the work of such masters as Satyajit Ray and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, this places Jane Campion's film on the highest level.

It must be quite frustrating for somebody who invested so much art and cinema know-how into making this film, and I suspect holds a lot of passion and tenderness for the heroes and for their times to read such feedback. I cannot however hide the facts. I liked a lot of things in Jane Campion's last film. Almost each scene is a visual masterpiece in setting, in colors, in placement of the actors, in the angles of the camera. It's a beauty to watch. But one does not come to the movies as he comes to a museum, and even for a visit in a museum two hours of continuous beauty without a break are tiring. The actors are well chosen, they are fresh faces and yet beautiful (Abbie Cornish) and expressive (Ben Whishaw' John Keats), and the film also brings the most adorable red-haired kid actor I have ever seen (the name is Edie Martin). Characters develop, and people speak, and fall in love, and love falls apart, and life falls apart, and there is a lot of poetry in all this, loudly read poetry, but then one does not come to the movies as he comes to a poetry reading. Some action is needed, some suspense is deserved - and this is exactly what 'Bright Star' is lacking in my opinion. We know everything that can and will happen in the film from the start, and the only unknown the film can offer is how fast or how slow the 119 minutes will go. Well, they were quite long for me by the end of the film.

Jane Campion is back to the period movies genre which made her most famous with 'The Piano'. In-between she made a couple of films in other genres ('Holy Smoke', 'In the Cut') which I liked more than the average critic and IMDb viewers opinion. I looked that the situation is reversed with 'Bright Star'.

I saw this film tonight, and in my eyes, it is a perfect film. Beautifully acted by all involved, (several times during the film I found myself thinking 'Abby Cornish is amazing!", despite not being a huge fan before), and stunningly shot, it contains some of the most beautifully cinematic scenes i have ever seen committed to film. Campion does a wonderful job of communicating Fanny' emotional state through the composition, particularly in one scene where the wind is blowing the curtain in her bedroom. The light and colour are fresh and gorgeous and the costumes and design add to the overall piece without being distracting, which is just what you want from a period piece.

But in the end, it is above all a wonderful story, well told. A deeply romantic tale, the story of Fanny and Keats could easily have become a mawkish, overly sentimental piece. But through her wonderfully naturalistic dialogue, her use of humour and light touch, and her restrained story telling (she never lets a scene go on one line too long) Jane Campion has created a heart wrenching film which I cannot fault. The characters are real and fully rounded, you feel the joys and the pain with them, and where I think she really succeeds is by making their love affair extraordinary and yet at the same time deeply ordinary. It stirred up my own personal experiences of love and loss and you would have to have a heart of stone not to shed a tear at the end. Lovely lovely film, and what cinema should be all about.

When a director handles with English writers' biographies, it is easy to fall into the clichè, when one deals with the biography of a romantic English poet, it could be still easier to fall into the manneristic-romantic, and the risk of disappointment is always lurking. Although I have a strong feeling for this kind of movies, in a way that whenever a shot on some English countryside appears, I could lose my sense of reality, I can objectively say that the fore-mentioned risk is totally and thankfully absent in "Bright Star", which on the contrary stands out for its sober and delicate handling of the short life of John Keats and of his deep love for Fanny Brown. It's through Fanny's eyes we get to know Keats' inner world and poetry, the verbal beauty of his poems, full of pathos, inner longing for life and death, passionate, whereas their love story remains almost platonic, fixed on a perfect level, where nothing can contaminate their deep communion. And still Jane Campion has the merit not to heat up their story, and to depict subtle, almost evanescent moments of their encounters. Very intense interpretations are offered by the two leading actors, but I would say that every character has a precise and significant meaning inside the movie. Easily to be perceived as a slow picture, Jane Campion gets to convey through a movie, which requires motion in itself, the slowness required by poetry. Poetry , writing, love require time, patience, and silence. The silent moments between Keats and Fanny are as intense and evocative as when they recite poetry, even the discrete, silent presence of Fanny's brother makes a sense. Wonderful, to say the least, the shots with Fanny lying on a lavender field, and the one with butterflies inside her room: truly ravishing.