Anyway, it may be of interest for you to know that I took the title of my rave review from one of John Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne:
Bedewed with Pleasures
by Aldrin Calimlim
Bright Star (2009)
D: Jane Campion
S: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Paul Schneider
I’m not particularly good with poetry. My attempts at understanding poems (the supposedly great ones, at least), let alone composing them, have invariably ended with me scratching my head, exhausted and plagued with prosodic perplexities. Those I did understand, although very remotely, were either explained to me by reading guides or by my uncle who used to read poems, such as William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis and William Earnest Henley’s Invictus, to me when I was only a curious little sponge. Something about the restrictive nature of poems, the significance of their rhymes (or absence thereof), and their tendency towards abrupt diversions makes them a particularly tough nut to crack, so tough in fact that once upon a time I indefinitely swore off making a stab at a poem that is more than four verses long. However, after watching Jane Campion’s biopic of John Keats, one of the most celebrated poets in history, at least twice, I see that pact I made with myself finally has to be broken.
Like one of Keats’s most famous compositions, Endymion, which begins with the statement, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” Campion’s film, Bright Star, opens with a sequence that evokes the same sentiments contained in that famous line and also serves to portend the allurement of the rest of the film: a needle, a piece of thread, and a hand delicately making stitches, not unlike the way a poet weaves words. The hand belongs to Frances “Fanny” Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a fashion student, the girl next door who falls deeply in love with John Keats (Ben Whishaw), resulting in an ill-fated romance that is the focus of the film.
Admittedly, there’s not much of a plot to speak of. It’s just John and Fanny being smitten with each other and all these forces trying to keep them apart both in distance and affection. There’s the cynical Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), John’s closest friend and colleague who disapproves of their relationship, arguing that it will no doubt take away his freedom and get in the way of his writing. There’s the times they live in, amongst people who deem John, who lives in penury on account of his indebtedness and his books selling very poorly, unsuited to marry Fanny. And then there’s John’s growing illness, a bad case of tuberculosis that would later claim his life at the young age of 25, leaving Fanny utterly devastated. Granted, it’s a plain story, but the manner in which it is told is anything but.
What Campion, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director of The Piano, and her troupe managed to come up with here is a masterpiece so richly acted it almost plays out like an enactment of a lengthy poem based on the last three years of John Keats. She makes the pre-Victorian era characters in her film recite odes and sonnets every ten minutes or so, but in the more dominant instances when they don’t, they speak so impeccably it’s as though they’re composing dialogical poems as they go along. More than anything, it’s a tribute to the talents at work that their acting and delivery appear to come as naturally as “leaves to a tree.” Cornish and Whishaw are especially commendable, one complementing the other as they, through conversations, poems, letters, dances, kisses, and stares, deal with the longing and exhilaration that are rooted in an obsessive, but nonetheless real, romantic relationship.
On a more technical level, not since Joe Wright’s Atonement caught me enamored in its grandeur have I seen such attention to detail as in Bright Star. Greig Fraser’s breathtaking cinematography, Janet Patterson’s dazzling production and costume design, and Mark Bradshaw’s unobtrusive score work together to augment the film’s poetic quality. To give you an idea as to how subtly beautiful, lyrical even, Bright Star is, I cite a couple of scenes that I think stand out above the rest: the scene where the lovers enjoy an afternoon stroll by the river park (a splendid recreation of George Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte if I ever saw one) and the scene where Fanny sits and reads one of John’s letters in the middle of a meadow filled with bluebells (shown above, it later became part of the cover art for the Vintage Classics collection of some of the best poems and letters by the poet, a book that I will no doubt grab the first chance I get). Campion, in telling the story of a great Romantic poet, ended up being a Romantic artist herself.
Bright Star took its title from John’s sonnet about Fanny, which begins with those two words, a fitting description of the former for the latter. I remember having encountered that poem in the distant past and, it being more than four verses long, I didn’t give it much thought, because as I have said in the beginning of this review and like Fanny in the beginning of the film, I was, is, not very bright with poetry. So during the scene when Fanny asked John how to properly understand a poem, I just had to pay attention to his answer: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” Surely, we all could use a bit of mystery in our lives. And John Keats could very well have been talking to me.
