Bright Star Review

After her strong early work - Sweetie, An Angel At My Table - culminated in the garlanded success of The Piano (1993), New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion has had an uneven ride. After poor receptions for Holy Smoke and In The Cut she had a six year break in her feature filmmaking career, instead making shorts and segments for portmanteau films. Bright Star, however, is very much a return to form.

Befitting a film about the love between the great Romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbour and muse Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), Campion's film is deeply sensuous. It's not a film that's most preoccupied with high drama, or anything more dynamic than a ball being thrown around in a meadow. Instead, it's languid but highly charged, defined by the fabric of the world around Fanny - the main character - and Keats. It even opens to a close-up of Fanny, characterised here as an innovative fashion designer, stitching. We can see the very texture of the cloth as it's punctured by the needle. Bright Star is a film that lingers on the changing seasons, food, kisses, the breeze, falling snow, birdsong, cat purrs and butterfly flutters. One of the strongest images is that of Keats laying in the top of a fruit tree, amid its spring blossom and lit by warm sun.

This emphasis on the senses doesn't mean the film is lacking in characterisation or narrative. As soon as we meet Fanny it's clear that Campion, whose screenplay was inspired by Andrew Motion's biography 'Keats', has worked hard to flesh out a character who, historically, has been marginalised. Fanny is quick-witted, somewhat sassy, and proud of her abilities as a seamstress and designer. ("This is the first frock in all of Hampstead or Woolwich to have a triple-pleated mushroom collar," she boasts to Keats at a party).