Bright Star
Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in Bright Star
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By Darren Estwick. |  |
Monday, 19, Oct 2009 01:00
Showing at the London Film Festival on October 19th (19:00), October 20th (16:00) and October 21st (13:00)
General release on November 6th
By Lewis Bazley.
Jane Campion's Bright Star is a beautifully paced and involving love story that will likely see the Kiwi director recognised by the Academy. Telling of the constrained and ill-fated love between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), Bright Star frames a charmingly reserved and passionate affair among the poet's evocative verse and the flowering pastels and muted browns of early 19th century England.
While concerned with the necessity of the possession of a good fortune and, given its male subject, notions of truth and beauty, the film's central strand observes the "holiness to the heart's affections", encapsulated in John and Fanny's intimate and affecting romance. With a chemistry between Whishaw and Cornish so sexually charged you can all but hear their hearts pumping ferociously as their attachment grows, the viewer becomes as deeply preoccupied by their love as to the object of one's own affections. When the inevitable tragedy occurs, Cornish and Whishaw's work is so convincing and authentic that we feel Fanny's growing apprehension and grief with every one of John's increasingly strained coughs.
Whishaw is already recognised as the finest actor of his generation - confirming it here with a fearful, twitchy and tactile performance, his eyes darting hither and thither as he searches for inspiration - but Cornish is a revelation. Though on the surface a cheaper Charlize Theron, she's the equal of the Oscar winner here, with a heartbreaking display of a woman with internal strength and fire ill-fitting to her era. Fanny is awoken and destroyed by true, all-encompassing love - while the necessity of the narrative remaining accurate means sending Keats off to Italy and giving an unfinished feel to the couple's story, it's only a precursor to the devastation of his eventual, final departure.
Campion's work is typically suffused with ambiguity and there's the subtly hinted suggestion throughout that Keats' early death was less due to his frail constitution than to the concerns of his friend and benefactor Charles Brown (Paul Schneider). Anxious that Keats' talent not be abandoned for love and the financial demands that marriage would bring, Brown is forever at war with Fanny. Keats' illness comes as an opportunity to save the poet's life but also to remove the distraction of love from the writer's mind - the quality of the work inspired by the height of his relationship with Fanny seems unimportant to Brown and Keats' other male supporters as they plot the poet's fateful passage to Rome.
The tragedy of Keats' life remains both his premature passing and the death of a love that inspired some of the most beautiful letters ever written. This delicately designed film, led by two stunning lead performances and shot with a restrained stillness, is a fitting tribute to his conception and experience of romantic love.