I was so pleased with the experience of watching Bright Star at the Laemmle Monica 4 I wanted to catch it a second time before writing about it. Owing to dollars and distance, that may have to wait for DVD. For now, here are the beans on the brightest film of the still-young year:

Jane Campion’s embellishment of the real-life romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne is both light on story and conventional in treatment, but it’s so intimately observed that it becomes something rare—a romance that’s truly romantic. The chasteness of the relationship (he died at the pitiful young age of 25 before he could marry her) seems to have inspired majestic restraint in a director well known for her sexual audacity. But while there is an absence of bare bodies onscreen, there is no dropping off in attention to sensual detail. Whether invoking a roomful of multi-colored butterflies, zeroing in on hands caressing books or needles sewing thread, or overseeing some of the most delicate kissing in cinema history, Campion is a master of the felicitous detail.

Keats is played by the diminutive Ben Whishaw in a performance that is becoming a specialty of his: the put-upon artist. He’s so touchingly tubercular you can almost forgive the sanctimonious treatment of the poet as a pure creature of emotion. (Young men bringing dates to this movie should prepare to be measured against an impossible adversary.) Abbey Cornish, as the resolute, self-reliant, modish Brawne (she designs and manufactures her own clothes) is every bit his equal—it’s hard to recall a more endearing screen couple. On hand as a safety measure against accusations of over-gentility is Paul Schneider, three-dimensionally loutish as Keats’s writing companion. There is also a little girl played by Edie Martin who has a face to match the cuteness of her nickname, “Toots.”  

In a film so full of elements that harmonize (photography, sets, costumes), special mention must be given to Mark Bradshaw’s score, which accomplishes the tricky task of sounding contemporary while staying true to the tenor of the period, and whose strings soar to such amazing heights that it stirred a desire I haven’t felt in a good long while: to purchase the soundtrack. The crowd I saw it with at the Laemmle Santa Monica stayed till the very end—something I don’t remember seeing before or ever expect to again. In retrospect it probably had something to do with Whishaw’s spot on recitation of a Keats couplet over the closing credits.