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Director: Jane Campion
Cast: Abbie Cornish, Paul Schneider, Thomas Sangster, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox
Run Time: 112 minutes
Country: United Kingdom/Australia/France/USA
Year: 2009
Language: English
Rating: G (No advisory)
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections,
and the truth of imagination.” – John Keats
Jane Campion achieved her first staggering success with
The Piano, which won a multitude of awards (including the
Palme d’Or in Cannes) and entrenched the director in the
pantheon of world-class filmmakers. She followed her
breakthrough work with highly sophisticated films like The
Portrait of a Lady and In the Cut, and now triumphantly
returns with Bright Star, which screened to rave reviews at
the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival®.
Bright Star chronicles the three-year love affair between
poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw, Brideshead Revisited, Layer
Cake,) and his neighbour Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish, Somersault,
Elizabeth: The Golden Age), a relationship that came
to an untimely end when Keats tragically died at the tender
age of 25. Keats is one of the best-known Romantic poets of
the nineteenth century, though during his short lifetime, his
poetry received no small amount of unfavourable criticism. It
was only after death that the extent of his influence was truly
felt and understood, as evidenced in the poetry of artists like
Alfred Tennyson. In addition to Keats’s poems, his aesthetic
theories, especially those dealing with the artistic value of uncertainty
– and hence the need for open-endedness and openmindedness
in life and work – are among his greatest legacies.
Bright Star, however, is not a traditional biopic of a great
artist. It tells the story of Keats’s love affair with Fanny from
Fanny’s perspective and is inspired heavily by found materials
like love letters. Campion has said she’s very interested in the
small, intricate details that contribute to our understanding
of these two people, and the film is more about love and art
than it is about turning Keats’s life into the stuff of myth.
Sometimes beauty really is in the details, and Campion
demonstrates this vividly in her heart-rending, gorgeous film
about a love doomed from the start, whose fate hovers over
every lush scene of the film. Given equal status to the main
characters, the English countryside serves as a monumental
backdrop to this intensely intimate, character-driven film.
“[Campion] breaks through any period piece mustiness
with piercing insight into the emotions and behavior of her
characters.” – Todd McCarthy, Variety
Reviews: www.metacritic.com/film/titles/brightstar
Official Site: www.brightstar-movie.com
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