Bright Star

natebell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:04:51 -0700

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.

Review: Bright Star

Brett McCracken — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:40:27 -0700

Jane Campion’s Bright Star is one of my favorite films of 2009 so far, and I highly recommend it to everyone–especially literary types, romantics, or fans of good cinematography/period pieces.

I wrote a full review of the film for CT Movies, but here’s a brief excerpt:

The love story is one thing, but the romance of Bright Star is also in its visual splendor and all-around loveliness. Cinematographer Greig Fraser does a superb job photographing the pastoral English countryside in all seasons, the life and customs of Regency-era Britain, as well as smaller-scale details like the sensual beauty of hands touching or a needle weaving. This is the feeling of falling in love: lying on a bed as the window curtains flap wistfully in the warm spring breeze; climbing atop a flowering tree and lying between its branches and the sun-filled sky; composing letters to our distant love while sitting at a desk by a window looking out to the sea. We don’t need to have heaps of dialogue or sappy soliloquies to know that love is in the air for these characters. We must simply look at the butterflies in the grassy field in the same way these characters do, recognizing that love makes you love others and love things more. It makes you love life.

The film is elemental–almost phenomenological–in the way that it seamlessly weaves human love and drama into the material “fabric” of its setting: nature, food, bodies, dress. In Bright Star, the dressing isn’t the icing on the cake. It is the cake.

The film’s title comes from Keats’ poem of the same name, which you should take a moment to read:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon in death.

The film is an amazing expression of everything this poem is getting at with regard to existence, impermanence, nature and love. It’s a gorgeous, poetic, true film and one that Keats deserves.