Review - Bright Star

This might be the most eagerly awaited (and dreaded) film in the literary calendar this year. I have a friend doing a PhD on Keats who is so emotionally invested that she can’t actually bear to watch it.

Keats, for some reason I’ve never been quite able to fathom, has often been idealised as some sort of asexual aesthetite - as anyone who’s actually read Keats’s poetry should be able to tell, the man was overwhelmingly sensual, even sexual, and was pretty ambivalent on the beauty of art vs. sexuality of life debate - witness his lines on the lovers frozen forever in art in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Is this the triumph of the immortality of art, or a torment akin to the most horrific in Hades? This film will hopefully offer a corrective to this misconception in that it is necessarily focussed on Keats as a man – a man with sexual desires and emotions that were instrumental in the shaping of his poetry.

Freud famously summed up the reasons to write as ‘money, fame and the love of women’. Keats desperately, perhaps more than anyone before or after, wanted all of these three things – his tragedy is that he achieved one of them, fame, too late, and the other he managed, love, was blighted by his lack of success in the last, money, and by his early death. But there is another tragedy in this story - Fanny’s, who, without Keats would have been a nobody in history: even with Keats she has still been a bit-part in his story, long ignored, misunderstood, and even vilified. In life, she was rejected as a bad influence by most of his friends; in death, she was lambasted for keeping Keats’s letters and the bequeathing them to her children for publication. And it is this tragedy that Jane Campion concerns herself with: when Keats departs for Italy, so too does he depart from the film – we stay with Fanny in Hampstead. This is a very good move – if Keats’s reputation has ossified him in the public mind, Fanny is an enigma, the perfect subject for story making. Whilst Keat’s love-letters to her are now considered among the greatest achievements of English literature, hers were burned: her story has remained mostly untold.

The film however, stays remarkably true to what of Keats and Fanny’s relationship can be objectively verified as fact from letters and biographic sources. Even bits which seem like modern overlays – Keats calls Fanny ‘minxtress’, are based upon reality – Keats admits in his letters to finding Fanny so forward that he did, in fact, calh her a ‘minx’. In fact, this is a film immersed in Keats – in his letters, his poems, his numerous biographies. Lines from his letters crop up constantly, adding an authenticity to the story without seeming imposed – iconic Keastian lines – such as his heart-wrenching words on first coughing blood: ‘I know the colour of that blood; - it is arterial blood; - I cannot be deceived in that colour; - that drop of blood is my death-warrant; - I must die’ are left out – this line would be too much of a set piece for such a subtle film. Its Keastianess goes beyond the level of narrative into the very mood of the film – the cinematography indolently lingers on beautiful images – of landscapes, of the lovers and moves with the lush, cloyed, sensuous, slowness, almost paralysis, of a Keatsian sonnet. These words are usually pejoratives – Keats has the power to turn pejoratives into positives. This film is an artwork in its own right. One beautifully arresting image – Fanny sitting among a field of bluebells wearing a matching dress, is the most gorgeous still I’ve seen from any film recently. I also love the idea that Fanny, with her flair for fashion, has dressed herself (and her sister) to match the landscape – evidently Campion shares her love for clothing.

One of the things I dislike intensely about films about poets is that they go around quoting their own poetry constantly – as if their egos are so enormous that they think that their own poetry is the most apt thing to say about everything. In real life, you’d have to be the most fantastic poet in the world before you could get away with spouting your own poetry on the slightest provocation. Even then you’d still be an egomaniac. Just an eloquent one. I understand that this is generally to introduce some of the poetry to those who have never read it, or, worse still, to induce that smug feeling of self-satisfaction among those that have when they recognise a line. This film used the poetry more sparingly than most – and more interestingly – it actually used the poetry rather than just shoving it in there as a padding around the narrative. There is a brilliant moment when Keats, reciting his ‘When I Have Fears that I Shall Cease to Be’, falters, and claims to have forgotten his last lines – but one suspects that this moment follows on so quickly from his brother’s death that these lines are simply too painful to be said aloud. This did a great thing – credited the audience with some insight and left it there – no need to spell it out. I was really hoping that when Keats’s friend Brown tried to catch Fanny out by asking her if she did not find Milton’s rhymes in Paradise Lost too ‘pouncey’, to which she demurely replied in the negative, that it would be left there. Unfortunately, the next scene had him roaring about blank verse – but perhaps I was expecting something a little too rarefied or even snobbish – and it was still evidence of a great wry and intellectual sense of humour which permeates this tragic film.

Actually, something astonishing happened to me during this film. Keats’s friend was reciting lines from Endymion to precede his defence of it to Fanny, and these lines hit me with such force of emotion and freshness that I involuntarily welled up (I know – you’re not meant to cry till the end of the film, and even then I appear to have been doing rather too much of it lately) Firstly, poetry hasn’t done this to me enough lately. Secondly, I’ve never really liked Endymion. Like Fanny, I think the opening something rather perfect, but like Keats’s friend (I know I should know the name), I think it great in some parts and immature in others. Like Fanny’s sister, I prefer my poems short, and most unfortunately, like the reviewer from Blackwood’s magazine, I am sometimes too intellectually lazy to sieve through the good for the sublime. This was sublime. I spent the rest of the film in a rather strange heightened emotional state – although, the film being so beautiful, it was a particularly Keatsian experience of a strange pleasure/pain nexus. I sort of floated home afterwards feeling strangely out of my own body and disconnected from the rainy, dark streets of Bristol, connecting with reality only to drop into a bookshop to buy Keats’s poems (I had decided the selected was no longer enough), letters, and Andrew Motion’s biography on which the film is based, and then settled down on my sofa to read. I can give no higher praise than this.

Unfortunately for me, Bright Star seems to have done this to everyone – I have now been searching for Motion’s biography for twenty-four hours and have just found out that even the publishers have sold out of copies. A run on Keats – if only he had lived to see the day.

On at cinemas nationwide. Go to http://www.brightstar-movie.com/ for more information.