Jane Campion's Bright Star

  FilmAffinity

I have finally managed to see Jane Campion's film Bright Star, which addresses the relationship between Fanny Browne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw). The film is visually stunning and exceptionally well shot, written, and acted, as one would expect from a director as important as Jane Campion. But there is much more: the narrative portrays Fanny Browne as an independent character, and depicts her relationship with John Keats as one of equals. The two characters communicate in ways fundamentally different from those associated with their traditional gender roles, and their relationship is based on a shared understanding of creativity and self-expression. In this respect, Jane Campion insightfully treats the subject of a love affair on the basis of romanticism, rather than conventional romance; as John Keats' character puts it in the film: "I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days. Three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."
 

As the film states in the end, John Keats died at twenty-five, believing himself a failure, and is now acknowledged as one of the greatest Romantic poets. The film's title makes reference to the following sonnet, which was written during his relationship with Fanny Browne:

                                       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 stedfast, still unchangeable,
                                       Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
                                       To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
                                       Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
                                       Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
                                       And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

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