'Bright Star' a film worth experiencing

• By JOHN WIRT
• Movie critic
• Published: Oct 16, 2009

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Baton Rouge and many other cities rarely get to experience art films these days. Lucky then that visionary Australian director Jane Campion’s Bright Star, a film about the blissful and tragic relationship that British poet John Keats and his bright star, Fanny Brawne, shared in early 19th-century England, is actually playing in Baton Rouge.

Campion made her international splash with the 1993 film, The Piano. Fans of The Piano — which won best actress and supporting actress Oscars for Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin and a best screenplay honor for Campion — will recognize Campion’s touch in Bright Star. Gorgeous to behold, the film also devastates with its portrait of impassioned lovers against whom fate conspires so mightily. 

Bright Star’s scenario is familiar in 19th-century literature. After his death, Keats will be proclaimed one of the great poets of British Romantic literature, but the reality of England, 1818, dictates that he is but a penniless young poet.

Keats meets Fanny, a young woman whose social class places her beyond his humble reach. Their relationship is initially adversarial, but the heart has a mind of its own. These two hearts intertwine into a mutually swooning state. They put the capital R in Romantic. 

Keats not being a man of means, it’s taboo for the poor 23-year-old poet to court 18-year-old Fanny. Sweetness denied being even more desirable, the tension in Keats and Fanny’s continuously threatened relationship is irresistible. Her mother objects, gently. His best friend and patron, Charles Armitage Brown, objects, obnoxiously. Keats’ own conflicted feelings hinder the couple, too. A happy union of the mismatched pair seems possible only in dreams.

Taking place between the lush country residence of the fatherless Brawne family and Keats’ cramped and ugly quarters in London, Bright Star contains imagery comparable to Johannes Vermeer interiors and Romantic landscape painting. Cinematographer Greig Fraser, another Australian, wields a thankfully steady camera that captures characters, rooms and exteriors with cool, even classic lucidity.

Amidst the film’s well-framed scenes there must be an actor and actress who can make Keats and Fanny live. Ben Whishaw fits the bill as Keats, a brooding, sensitive young man who takes periodic detours from his work to spend idyllic but fleeting moments with Fanny. Of course, she becomes his greatest inspiration. 

Abbie Cornish’s Fanny embodies a hot, otherworldly devotion to her immortal beloved. Keats is her oxygen. She’ll suffocate without him. Expressing a range of moods and emotions, often nuanced because of the social restraints of the time, it’s a moving performance from the Australian actress, good enough to earn her, as Holly Hunter did for The Piano, an Oscar nomination.

And Campion’s masterfully wrought Bright Star — filmmaking that has little to do with conventional cineplex entertainment but still is wonderfully accessible for those so inclined — easily deserves inclusion on critic’s 2009 top 10 lists.