A needle and thread, pushed and pulled through muslin, are kept in shallow focus during the first few moments of “Bright Star.” Their movements, rendered by the calm and certain hands of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), mirror those director Jane Campion took with her subject. Rather than juggle all the years of John Keats’ life, she weaves gently through the last three, anchoring her film in the love and correspondence between Keats and Fanny. Though other aspects of Keats’ life―financial hardships, mixed critical reception―can be found on the film’s periphery, “Bright Star” concerns itself largely with hushed affections shared in summer hours, with words spoken and celebrated in the soft light of late-afternoon.
The film is tender, but never mawkish, sweet, but never saccharine; avoiding the missteps made by so many costume dramas, it never allows its romance or its drama to collapse into parody. Campion advances the narrative fluidly, meeting their quiet love with a quiet confidence. She also escapes the haughty didacticism that pervades period pieces (especially those with star-crossed lovers), trusting her audience with the complexities of love and poetry and creating a series of slow but meaningful scenes; each shot elaborates, but no shot instructs.
Though the film deals with Keats, his poetry, and his friendship with Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), his loyal, if territorial fellow poet cum patron, its primary focus―as is expected from Campion (she has, as Amy Taubin wrote, “devoted her career to exploring female subjectivity”)―is Fanny. Initially uninterested in poetry, Fanny firmly believes that life should be lived in a practical manner. “My stitching has more merit and admirers than your two scribblings put together,” she tells the pair of poets, “And I can make money from it.” Slowly, however, as she finds herself spending more time with Keats the man, she becomes more interested in Keats the poet. She commits to memory the beginning of “Endymion,” as well as a smattering of other lines.
Though their friends and family make clear the social and financial incompatibilities of such a pairing, the couple are content to spend their time in the tender grip of young love, through kisses stolen in the bowers of the Brawne estate and, when Keats finds himself reluctantly away, through passionate letters. The film often places Fanny near a window, bathed in natural light, languidly reading, writing, or awaiting a letter. These vignettes, reminiscent of Vermeer’s “The Mikmaid,” punctuate the film, adding weight to the films actions by highlighting the spaces between them.
Complications build up, between Keats’ deteriorating health and the scandal building around their relationship, but even as things threaten to fall apart, Campion’s film does not. The mise-en-scene remains lush and the film dense, maintaining the pain of Keats’ tragedy without allowing it to become melodramatic. The cast, particularly the two young leads, ground the film with remarkably strong performances, wielding such verisimilitude, such a command of human emotion that the story is uniquely affecting, almost painfully so.
Though “Bright Star” cannot erase what we know about Keats’ untimely death, it does allow us, for a few short hours, to inhabit “a sleep/ Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” The love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne is infamous, but Campion and her cast are able to make it very honest, and very real.
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