Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive

Dec

2009

Bright Star

Posted on 14:15, December 11th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

: Image via Wikipedia

Last night, I finally saw Bright Star on its last night at the Queen’s Film Theatre. The movie was a fiction, but a lovely one, about the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. From the opening in which we saw her needlework up close, it was clear that this was not the poet’s story but hers. Overall, though I would have liked to have seen Brawne’s fashion work defended in terms of being artistic (not merely as having more fans and bringing in more income than the men’s poetry), the film was well-written. Despite its focus on Fanny, the film did make clear John’s economic plight and the contrast between it and the situation of his wealthier artistic friends. There was also no suggestion whatsoever that critics of Endymion had killed him. Rather, the first crisis of his illness coming after he road on the outside of a carriage on a rainy winter’s night. Jane Campion‘s fiction, in other words, is more accurate than Shelley’s. She also made good use of the letters and poems, with the former being foregrounded (both in the plot and the cinematography) and the latter appearing at times in bits and pieces or else recited after composition.

The movie did, however, stumble in a few places. A tendency to linger on certain shots made it slightly unbalanced. Worse, these images were terribly cliche: Fanny lying on her bed or amongst flowers in agony or ecstasy, our heroine in various postures bathed in soft light filtered through a window. Even if these visuals were not cliche, they would have become so by the end of the film given how often they were repeated. Perhaps these were failed attempts at developing visual leitmotifs.

As for the acting, Abbie Cornish‘s performance as Fanny was flawless, and most of the supporting cast played their parts admirably well. Ben Whishaw as Keats, however, came across at times as too stiff and too melancholy.