‘Poetry’s an arcane art and people are often almost hostile to it’ — Jane Campion always knew a Keats biopic would be a hard sell.
“I wanted it to be more specific and personal.” That’s how Jane Campion describes her hopes for making Bright Star different than what it could easily have been: just another entry in the Merchant Ivory school of period dramas with distinguished literary pedigrees, full of actors spouting posh Limey accents whilst trussed in bodices.
“The difference is very subtle between what I wanted to do and what I thought they didn’t do,” the maker of The Piano adds in an interview from Cannes. “Some of them try to be more popular, like when they strain to turn Jane Austen’s stories into more heady romances. Sometimes it’s a subtle matter of keeping the integrity of more difficult ideas.”
If that was her ambition, then handily Campion achieves it here. Avoiding the stuffiness that can mar so many period films or biopics of famous scribes, Campion gets straight to the heart of the matter in Bright Star, a superb rendering of the true-life love story between a headstrong young woman and the most ill-fated of Romantic poets.
John Keats (Ben Whishaw) is already well on his way to his early grave at the age of 25 when he meets Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a stroppy, fashion-forward lass who initially cares not a jot for poetry. The two develop a passionate connection despite the objections of Keats’s overprotective pal Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider), the worries of Fanny’s mother (Kerry Fox) and the poverty and poor health that made Keats a lousy marriage prospect. Indeed, Fanny virtually sacrifices her future for the man she loves, an act that makes her the latest in Campion’s long line of heroines who are determined to the point of potentially destroying themselves.
“She was a beautiful, young, very marriageable woman and she blew it all for her emotions and her heart,” says Campion. “So I think she is very, very courageous even if she wasn’t openly rebellious. I’m moved by her courage. I don’t know if I would’ve had the same — I might’ve been more self-protective.”
Conveying the couple’s particular chemistry with all the sensitivity and intensity it deserves, Campion also gives their love story a rare degree of immediacy. Cornish, the 27-year-old Australian last seen playing opposite now-boyfriend Ryan Philippe in Stop-Loss, attributes that quality to the director’s refusal to let any period-film fustiness mar what they were trying to do. According to her, the advice that Campion gave to her actors was this: “The clothes, the sets and the hair will be 1818, but I want you to be real people — I don’t want you to feel like you have to act 1818.”
Yet the director and her cast also pay careful attention to the social decorum and intellectual climate of the era. Besides giving the film great texture, this strategy succeeds in situating Keats’s poetry in the context that originally produced it. Thus does Bright Star become something rarer than a film about a poet: It’s a film about poetry, too, something that Campion knew would make it a hard sell when she began developing it four years ago.
“When I had this idea, I thought, ‘Oh, how sad for me to fall in love with this, because no one’s going to make it,’” she says. “Poetry’s an arcane art and people are often almost hostile to it. They don’t like it — and even I don’t like it! I have come to adore it, but I’ve had lessons and done the work and I feel some confidence when approaching it now. But if you don’t understand something, you tend not to like it — that’s the way prejudices work.”
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