BRIGHT STAR AND POETS IN FILM ad, ad · the 'Lake Poets' may seem less promising dramatic material...
Transcript of BRIGHT STAR AND POETS IN FILM ad, ad · the 'Lake Poets' may seem less promising dramatic material...
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CRITICAL ws
BRIGHT STAR AND POETS IN FILM
ad, ad D an angerous
to know - BUT NOT ALWAYS
Brian McFarlane takes Jane Campion's latest film as his starting point for examining the cinematic representation
of poets and their poetry.
ou have to be famous for film-
makers to want to turn your
life into a biopic, and if you care
about accuracy in relation to the
'facts', then it's probably in your
interests to have been dead for quite
a long time. Take, for instance, Lord
Byron, who also had the advantage of a
spectacular off-page life and who seems to
have been represented more times on film
than any other major poet. But I guess no
one goes to biopics with the expectation of
documentary detail about the lives that are
the1r putative subjects.
Biop1cs were a staple of film-going as far
back as the 1930s, with films depicting the
struggles of scientists (The Story of Louis
Pasteur [William Dieterle, 1935) or Madame
Curie [Mervyn LeRoy, 1943], for instance), or
composers (usually tosh, but fun), or sporting
heroes. The genre hasn't been so common 1n
recent years, though there were respectable
goes at Cole Porter (De-Lovely [Irwin Winkler,
2004]) and Alfred Kinsey (Kmsey [Bill Condon,
2004]). At its most popular, it offers ready-
made material for film narrative in the sense
of an overall trajectory that Involves struggles
11 0 • Metro Magaz1ne 164
for recognition and the convincing of scepti-
cal or self-interested others, the interweaving
of the emotional and professional lives of the
protagonist, and the move towards some kind
of gratifying climax. The most one is likely
to get from biopics is a genre entertainment,
with long-established conventions, in which,
at best, some sense of the informing impulses
of the 'life' emerges. Biopics are rarely about
failure, and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009),
despite our knowing the unhappy outcome
for John Keats, is no exception.
In fact, Bright Star is really as much a tender
romance as it 1s a biopic. It led me, though,
to wonder about the difficulty of representing
writers on screen. There's a limit to how long
we want to watch someone sitting earnestly
at a desk with quill poised over the paper
(like George Sand/Merle Oberon in A Song
to Remember [Charles Vidor, 1945]) or, more
up to date, hand hovering over the typewriter
or Its latter-day descendant, the keyboard.
Writers can be a bit intractable when it comes
to showing them at work, compared, say, with
singers, dancers or painters, whose art is more
susceptible to the visual. If writers in general
offer a challenge to so pre-eminently visual an
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art form as film, poets in particular may be still
harder nuts to crack. We'd hardly want to go to
the cinema to see pages of Paradise Lost line
by line on the screen. At least a narrative poem
such as 'The Man from Snowy River' offers
something in the way of plot, should anyone
dec1de to film the life of A.B. (Banjo) Paterson,
but how about a lyric poet, a poet who deals in
emotional utterance and expresses himself 1n
terms at a remove from mundane 'meaning'?
How can/does film go about giving any sense
of what motivates a poet, let alone rendenng
the product of such source Impulses?
The most likely answer would seem to lie
in film's power to render some of the verbal
effects of the poetry on the page in terms of
1ts own capacity for visual poetry. This is not
the same as simply looking for a visual way
of transliterating the original poem (though a
sequence from Julien Temple's Pandaemo-
nium [2001] approaches this when it offers
an exquisite cinematic correlative for Col-
eridge's 'Frost at Midmght'); it is finding 1n its
own complex semiotic arsenal the means of
evoking what may have been at the heart of
the poet's inspiration. It's not just a matter of
somehow 'adapting' the poetry to the screen;
1t is also worth pondering how film might
convey the kind of passion or insight that has
produced the poetry. On recently watch1ng
several films that take a poet's life as their
starting point, whether a real or a fictional
poet, I'm struck by how little the films are
concerned with what makes a poet a poet, or
poetry poetry, preferring for the most part to
concentrate on the scribblers' eccentnc1ties
and sex lives. It's as if they'd taken to heart
those lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream:
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet,
Are of imagination all compact. (Act 5, 1 :7-8)
Most often films about poets have concentrat-
ed on their love lives. Take, for example, the
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ridiculous Bad Lord Byron (David MacDon-
ald, 1948), or the even worse Total Eclipse
(Agnieszka Holland, 1995 (1998 1n Austral-
ia)), which gave Rimbaud such a doing-over.
Byron, I guess, IS a g1ft to filmmakers. even
if they don't seem to know what to do with
him. The 1948 Bntish film positions him as a
freedom fighter who dies in the struggle for
Greek independence, and IS subjected, as
he sleeps his last, to an imagined celestial
tnal 1n wh1ch various people testify as to
whether or not he is indeed 'the bad lord
Byron'. Witnesses include the women in h1s
life, most VIVidly Lady Caroline Lamb (Joan
Greenwood), who so famously described
h1m as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'
(she could talk!), and the late love of his life,
the Italian Countess Teresa Guiccioli (Mai
Zetterling). The latter leads him to compose
(and rec1te on screen), 'So I'll go no more
a-roving', as if this forged the link between
the life and the poetry. In the heavenly trial,
a SimplistiC dichotomy is set up between
the prosecution, dressed in dark robes and
photographed to match, and the defence, 1n
light dittos. It is impossible to accept a man-
nered Dennis Price as e1ther freedom fighter
or poet, and for all that the film is sprinkled
with lines such as 'There's no use treating
a poet like other men', there is almost no
sense of the poet's difference and separate-
ness. just a parade of tableaux in wh1ch he
struts about, an Inevitable recit1ng of 'She
walks in beauty ... ', and lines like 'And what
do you make of Chi/de Harold?' In fact, the
book written by producer Sydney Box at the
time of the film's making is more intelligent
and interesting than the resulting film.'
In Ken Russell's Goth1c (1986). Byron (Gabri-
el Byrne this time) is joined by Shelley (Julian
Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be, Mary (Nata-
sha Richardson), the author of Frankenstein.
In a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, they
engage in a night of bizarre behaviours and
imaginings that are the forerunner to Mary's
seminal work. 'I eat merely to live; imagina-
tion is my sustenance,' declares Byron,
here depicted as a dangerous game-player
1: JOHN KEATS (BEN WHISHAW) AND FANNY BRAWNE (ABBIE CORNISH) IN BRIGHT STAR2: CHARLES BROWN (PAUL SCHNEIDER) AND KEATS 3: KEATS AND FANNY 4: FANNY AND HER SISTER 'TOOTS' (EDIE MARTIN 5: FANNY
112 • Metro Magaz1ne 164
whom Mary sees as a heartless seducer.
Meanwhile Shelley, like Byron 'bored with
life', is, as Mary mourns, ' too full of his own
tragedies to bear mine'. As with so much
of the Russell oeuvre, there is a flamboyant
daring about the film that scores as many
misses as hits, but occasionally it has a
kind of wild poetry of its own. Shelley at one
point observes that ' the rainwater catches
the moonlight like the trail of a slug'. The
line doesn't come from his published works
but does encapsulate a poet's capacity for
linking improbable phenomena to create a
new percept1on.
Though it may well be the case that on
film the pen is not mightier than the sword,
the little-seen Pandaemonium goes some
distance to showing filmically what the proc-
esses of poetic creation might be like. I've
ment1oned the magical moments in which
Coleridge (Linus Roache) seems to be find-
ing inspiration for his tenderly lovely 'Frost
at Midnight', and indeed this neglected film
deserves to be better known. At first glance,
the 'Lake Poets' may seem less promising
dramatic material than Byron and h1s mates,
but wait a minute ... There's Coleridge
hooked on laudanum, and the film's visual
gymnastics do capture something of the
disordered mind that gave the world 'Kubla
Khan' and 'The Rime of The Ancient Man-
ner'. and shows how Colendge somehow
maintained marriage to the down-to-earth
Sara (Samantha Morton). There is the revolu-
tionary fervour that gave way to something
more stolid in the case of Wordsworth (John
Hannah), not to speak of his incestuous
feelings for sister Dorothy (Emily Woof). The
contrast of the two authors of Lynca/ Bal-
lads (1798) makes for some real character
interest. even if the film is probably unfair to
Wordsworth. In Hannah's performance, he
has already become 'Daddy Wordsworth',
'thlck-ankled' as Matthew Arnold would later
describe him.
More than most films 'about' poets, Pan-
daemonium does make the poetry and its
creation a matter of central importance. For
instance, in the sequence 1n which Col-
eridge's imagination is gripped by the idea
of 'The Ancient Mariner', Temple shows real
visual fla1r in the accompanying images. The
two poets have observed an eel fisherman
at work, with his slimy quarries wriggling:
while Wordsworth offers a prosa1c account
of the eel-fishing industry (which no doubt
feeds 1nto h1s 'Resolution and Independ-
ence' where the fisherman has become a
leech-gatherer), Coleridge is fired by the
notion that 'slimy things did crawl with legs/
Upon the slimy sea'. The aural and the v1sual
work quite powerfully together in this long
episode in which the idea of the poet as
a man possessed IS rendered tn the film's
imagery and in the intensity of Roache's
performance. And it is not done w1th the
numbing literalness of trying to 'illustrate'
verse by means of audio-visual moving im-
ages. In a tonally different sequence, as if to
do just1ce to Wordsworth, Temple somehow
avoids the absurd when he presents Words-
worth composing 'Tintern Abbey' as he
walks on the hillside: 'I have IelVA presence
that disturbs me w1th the joy/Of elevated
thoughts'; 'The sound1ng cataract/Haunted
me like a passion ' and so on. The great thing
about Pandaemonium 1s that it persistently
foregrounds the poetry or what has 1nsp1red
it, how it gets made and sometimes how 11 1s
received, and it does so in terms that belong
to the cinema while doing justice to the
great works of the earlier medium.
Women and words
Of the many other films that have taken po-
ets as protagon1sts, most have been drawn
to those who led more or less tormented
lives. Take poor Sylvia Plath. Chnstlne Jeffs'
2003 b1opic Sylvia opens with her (Gwyneth
Paltrow) sleeping face in close-up and her
voice inton1ng on the soundtrack:
Sometimes I dream of a tree, and the tree
1s my life. One branch is the man I shall
marry, and the leaves my children. Another
branch is my future as a writer and each
leaf is a poem. Another branch is a glittering
academic career. But as I sit there trying to
choose, the leaves begm to turn brown and
blow away until the tree IS absolutely bare.
Her eyes are then open. but what we have
been g1ven is a poet's 1mag1ng of her life's
possibilities: we have been inducted into a
special way of apprehending the world and
her place in it. In this intelligent film there are
also 1mages of Plath typing away while the
words ('One day I'll have my death of him')
appear on screen and the perhaps inevitable
shots of typewriters in close-up. But this IS
as much the study of a marriage- Plath's
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to poet Ted Hughes (Dan1el Cra1g) - as of a
poet. It is a marriage that bnngs as much
pain as pleasure, and maybe an element
of jealousy, not just of the other women
Hughes becomes involved with but also of
his greater renown. 'It must be wonderful to
be married to such a great poet,' someone
gushes, but Plath doesn't wan· to bathe 1n
his reflected glory. And he is sure his poetry
is more important than hers. V>.hen she
writes 'Lady Lazarus', AI Alvarez (Jared Har-
ris). prais1ng it, tells her that it IS 'expressed
with a coolness like a murderer's confes-
sion' Sylvia makes resonant use of a diction
that belongs to poets: 'I really feel that God
IS speaking through me,' Plath says in a mo-
ment of poetic exaltation.
Stevie (Robert Enders, 1978) is one of the
few other films about a woman poet I am
familiar with and it has not been available
for th1s study. The line I remember from the
film, based on Hugh Whitemore's play of the
same name, is poet Stevie Smith's reply to
a journalist (?) asking how such a woman
- reclusive, probably celibate -could have
written with such passion: 'I loved my aunt. '
She refers to her 'lion aunt of Hull' who
brought her up after her father had aban-
doned his family and her mother had died.
As delivered by Glenda Jackson as Stevie
(Mona Washbourne plays Aunt Madge) this
line had the ring of absolute emotional truth
and has stayed with me for thirty years. I
mention this film here because Stevie's reply
etched so vividly the idea of how an emo-
tion felt in one relationship might feed into
writing about others. These two films about
twentieth-century women poets give an
impressive sense of how their lives fed their
poetry. And significantly, Glenda Jackson
recalled her meeting w1th Stevie Smith when
the poet was reading her famous 'Not Wav-
Ing but Drowning':
The next day I rushed out and bought any
copies of her work I could find. I remem-
bered that meeting so distmctly and 1t
informed everything about doing the play
and then the film.'
This is perhaps less true of Sidney Franklin's
The Barretts of Wimpole Street, his 1956
British remake of the Hollywood film he had
d1rected 1n 1934, starring Norma Shearer as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fredric March
as Robert Brown1ng and Charles Laughton
as father Barrett. These roles were taken 1n
the remake by a rather too-healthy-looking
Jennifer Jones, a strapp1ng Bill Travers and
a fiercely convincing John Gielgud. The film
begins with Jones's voice intoning on the
soundtrack Elizabeth's best-known poem,
'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
.. .' and ends with its last lines, ' ... I love
thee with the breath/Smiles, tears, of all my
life! ' Bookended between these quotings
is a robust melodrama of love triumphing
over paternal opposition (based in domestic
tyranny and possibly incestuous inclina-
tions) but not much sense of poets at work.
We have to take for granted that Elizabeth,
from her chaise longue, has become a m1nor
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celebrity, and when big Bill Travers comes
bounding into the Wimpole Street house we
learn that they have been in correspondence
and he has fallen in love with her through her
verse. As for his creative work, we get these
scraps: the well-known anecdote about how,
when he wrote 'Sordello'. 'Only God and
Robert Browning knew what I meant. Now,
God only knows'; Elizabeth's giggling cousin
Bella (Susan Stephen), on being introduced
to him goes into a recitation of 'Nobly, nobly
Cape St Vincent ... '; and Elizabeth herself
twice quotes the 'f1rst fine careless rapture'
b1t from 'Home-thoughts, from Abroad' .
Whatever the film's other merits, it can
hardly be taken seriously as a study of poets
going about their vocation.
Men at work
For contrasting views of two male poets at
work, I draw bnef attention to Total Eclipse
(the very title hints at what should have
been the film's destiny) and Gillies MacKin-
non's Regeneration (1997), derived from Pat
Barker's fine novel. Total Eclipse is about as
appalling and ridiculous a biopic - oh, any
film - as I can recall in recent times. Its main
narrative thrust is the famous gay love story
of drunken French poet Paul Verlaine and
provinc1al genius Arthur Rim baud. Rim-
baud (Leonardo DiCapno) writes to Verlaine
(David Thewlis), who unwisely invites him
to come and live wtth htm and his pregnant
wife in Paris. The opening caption about the
exchange of letters distmguishes between
merely be1ng 'a great poet' and being a
genius The film never begins to make one
believe that this pair of tedious charlies
could write anything that anyone else would
want to read. From Rimbaud's arrival at
Vertaine's Paris house, the film shows how it
plans to signify his genius. He belches, spits
and says to the ladies at first meeting, 'I
need a piss.' The screenplay is by Chris-
topher Hampton, who should have known
better than to allow Rimbaud to say of one
of hts poems: 'It means exactly what it
says. Word for word. No more no less.' or ' I
couldn't care less about publishing. It's only
the writing that matters.' or 'It was no longer
enough for me to be one person; I had to be
everyone. ' The film offers every cliche about
writers and clearly believes none of them.
Regeneration, which I suspect was never
released here, is very much worth seeking
out on DVD. It is also concerned with the
meeting of two poets: Siegfried Sassoon
114 • Metro Magaztne 164
(James Wilby) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart
Bunce), who both fetch up at Craiglockhart
War Hospital in Scotland 1n 1917, near the
end of the First World War. Psychiatrist Dr
William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) must assess
the sanity of Sassoon, who, though deco-
rated in the war, has made public, written
criticism of how the British military has
conducted the war; and Rivers IS also as-
signed the treatment of budding poet Owen,
as well as other disturbed soldiers. Inserts of
the mud and horror of the trenches reminds
us of Owen's dictum that 'the poetry is in the
pity', and the film makes intelligent use of
the actual poems. Sassoon's 'Base Details'
is heard in voice-over as Rivers reads 'the
quite good poem' Sassoon has left for him,
and it makes plain Sassoon's attitude to the
complacency of the home front. Sassoon
urges Owen to 'write something about the
war' and there is an ongoing sense of col-
laboration between the established poet and
the younger Owen. When the latter is writ-
Ing his requiem, 'Anthem for Dead Youth',
Sassoon suggests that 'Doomed' would be
more resonant than 'Dead', and in their next
sequence together the poem's title has been
changed and 'passing-bells' substituted for
'monstrous bells' in the opening line. I'm
aware of making this sound more banal than
it is in the context of the film. Regeneration
is fundamentally about the effects of war on
diverse men, but it also persuades one as
to how poets might influence and help each
other and make something true and valuable
out of ghastly life experiences.
Imaginary poets
Fictional poets are another matter. And thin
on the ground, perhaps not surprisingly,
when you think of the popular forms of
multiplex fodder. However, at least two have
appealed to big star names: Irvin Kershner's
A Fine Madness (1966) and Joseph Losey's
Boom! (1968). The latter can be dismissed
as of minimal interest here (and perhaps not
much anywhere else). In it Richard Burton
plays Chris Flanders, a poet with a reputa-
tion for preying on ageing rich women. one
of whom, shrewish beauty Flora Goforth,
prov1des a rote hand-Taylored for Eliza-
beth. We are told that Flanders was once
a fashionable poet, though not offered any
evidence of his creative work, and when he
starts to recite 'Kubla Khan' to Mrs Goforth
she snaps Impatiently, 'What?' He is now
known as the 'angel of death'. It is all very
portentous, very symbolic and very empty.
Samson Shillitoe, the iconoclastic poet figure
of A Fine Madness, is played with a certain
zest by Sean Connery, briefly released from
mid-sixties Bondage. Every now and then
he quotes from a well-known poem ('Has no
man ever told you "My love IS like a red, red
rose" or that he "loved your moments of glad
grace"? he asks the astonished meet1ng of
a ladles' club), but mostly we know he is a
poet only because he behaves so badly to
everyone, often drunk and usually insulting.
But it's not all cliche and the actors are good
enough to make one accept such formula-
tions about the poet's needs and sense of
his creative self as these: 'When the poem
is go1ng nght he's in another world', his w1fe
(Joanne Woodward) explains; and he tells a
psychiatrist, 'You protect what is, I envis-
age what might be. ' It's not a profound film
but it is not foolish either. And the Monthly
Film Bulletin was right to suggest that even
if it 'doesn't ultimately come off ... at least
it makes a valiant attempt to present a poet
who works at his job'3 - and that is one of
the persistent strengths of the best of the
films under discussion.
Other films with fictional poets 1nctude Neil
LaBute's Possession (2002), adapted from
A.S. Byatt's novel in which present-day
academics investigate the affairs of a Victo-
rian poet, convincingly enough incarnated by
Jeremy Northam, and Anthony Asquith's The
Final Test (1953), which has some simplistic
notions of poets as young men who forget
the time when in the gnp of inspiration. This
particular young man (Ray Jackson) tells hts
test-cricketer dad (Jack Warner) that 'When
you're writing you get so worked up, it's like
being drunk'. The object of his veneration is
a rude and portly cliche of a poet caricatured
in Terence Rattigan's screenplay and Robert
Morley's performance. Cliches are what we
are apt to get in the screen's representation
of poets and their work; they are, happily,
not what we get in Jane Campion's Bright
Star.
Something like it: Bright Star
It was viewing Bright Star that led me to re-
flect on the way poets' lives and work have
been represented on screen. Now, it can be
said that Campion has also concentrated
on Keats' love for Fanny Brawne, the 'bnght
star' of the title, but the result is neither
ridiculous nor vulgar.
The poet emerges firmly as the man in love
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in Bright Star, and Fanny herself shares the
film's attention, not just as the object of
Keats's love but as a dressmaker who can
support herself by her work. The film actu-
ally opens on the image of a needle piercing
cloth, and, ignorant as I am about such
matters, I felt that all Fanny's costumes have
the look of skilfully home-made clothes. She
prepares herself for her meet1ng with Keats,
vis1t1ng a bookseller who is cross at having
taken twenty cop1es of 'Endymion' that
he is finding hard to sell (her young sister
volunteers the remark 'Fanny wants to see
if he's an idiot or not'), and is later heard
reading aloud its famous open1ng line, 'A
thing of beauty is a JOY forever/Its loveliness
Increases'.
It is Fanny who makes the runmng in their
relationship, quoting 'Endymion' to him
when she approaches him at a dance, where
he seems to be a mere looker-on at the
gaieties. She questions his association with
the clumsy Charles Brown (Pau Schneider),
who will come to look upon Keats' Interest in
Fanny as a distraction from his true voca-
tion. But this IS not a densely potted film;
neither Is it a solid costume romance in the
traditions of either Hollywood or BBC TV. If
anyth1ng, it feels more like a continental film,
prepared to let the central relat onship daw-
dle, w1thout losing a certain sexual tension,
and to let the sense of Keats as a writer
emerge. The film not only quotes some of
the most recognisable lines bu also man-
ages to subsume these into its unobtrusive
narrative habits.
The overarching narrative facts are Keats'
and Fanny's growing affection, the shadow
of h1s persistent ill-health and our knowledge
of his early death (and the con rast of Ben
Whishaw's pallor and Abbie Cornish's look
of rude health is important to the drama).
But these do not make for a gloomy film:
Keats is seen as quietly playfu when he
quotes his sonnet, 'When I have fears ... ' at
the Brawnes' dinner table, where they have
been left alone and h1s hand reaches for
hers. When he gets to the line about 'Huge
cloudy symbols of a high romance', I was
reminded of that other great film about un-
consummated love, Brief Encounter (David
Lean, 1945), in which the unromantic hus-
phrase quoted in the film from Keats' letters
where he writes that he is 'sure of nothing
but the holiness of the heart's affections'.
The love scenes are done with tenderness
and tact, and are not any less persuasive for
the fact that the lovers remain fully clad.
And what about the poet as distinct from the
lover? The tone in which 'When I have fears
... ' is introduced into the film is symptomatic
of Bright Star's discretion and balance: the
poem, with its intimations of mortality, works
on our knowledge of Keats' early death but
the cheerful domestic setting in which he
speaks it seems to insist that we value the
life and perception that has produced the
sonnet. Christopher Ricks, 1n a patronis-
ing and misguided piece In The New York
Review of Books, claims - nay, asserts- that
'there can never be a substitute for such
imagination as offers so much to the mind's
eye'": he doesn't begin to take account of
how a film sequence through its placement
in the over-all narrative trajectory, as well
as in the details of its mise en scene, might
offer the viewer a new aspect of the poem.
It is not worth belabouring Ricks because,
gifted though he 1s as a literary critic, he
clearly is less well-placed to JUdge effects
achieved cinematically.
What the film does achieve is a sense of
what it may be like to be a poet, as well as
a (doomed) lover. As In the sequences in
Regeneration in which Sassoon and Owen
work on 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' , there
are images of the poet actually working on
a poem, urged on sometimes by his friend
Brown. For all that Keats claimed that if po-
etry 'comes not as the leaves on the tree It
were best it not come at all', he also clearly
worked at his art. There is a juxtaposition
of shots in which Campion cuts from Fanny
at her sewing to Keats' thinking aloud, 'My
heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
my sense .. .' : that is, a point is simply and
potently made about two kinds of work. In
my view, the film makes properly prolix an
imaginative use of both the poetry and the
letters. Why, after all, might a poet in love
not recite a new poem to the object of his
affections, as Keats does with 'La belle
dame sans merci', and why might not she
take up the lines with 'I love thee true'? The
band 1s doing a crossword that asks him to poem, that is, is being built into the film's
complete the line and his wife answers, 'Ro- narrative texture. As Sophie Gee has said,
mance.' The romance of Bright Star Is not a 'Campion stages it as a semi-consummation
depressing affair, despite the acts: instead, scene? and Fincina Hopgood rightly claims
it seems more like a muted celebration of a (though she is not speaking particularly of
this moment) that 'The actors deliver Keats'
lines without self-consciousness and effort,
allowing the words to speak the emotions•.a
There's a great deal more I'd like to say
about this often exqwsite film that articulates
its idea of poetry very appropriately through
the visual, as In a beautiful wintry scene on
Hampstead Heath. The casting of Australian
Abbie Cornish as Fanny and Ben Whishaw
as Keats seems to me absolutely spot-on:
physically they incarnate perfectly the robust
bloom of Fanny and the sallow, shadowed
look of Keats, and between them, visually as
well as in the psychological shadings they
bring to their roles, seem as nearly perfect
as makes no matter. This IS a film about a
great artist and an impress1ve woman: they
complement and enhance each other.
'We cannot do without interpretations', says
Ricks, while being unwill1ng to adm1t that
film might offer a reading not just of lines but
of lives- as I believe Bright Star does. Films
about poets can, at the1r best, provide us
with another set of images to complement,
contradict or enrich those we have already
imbibed from our reading. Keats Is famously
a poet of the senses; Campion, In th1s film
and in her medium, seduces us aurally and
visually, and makes us think again about the
famous poet in the context of his life and
work.
Endnotes
' Sydney Box & Vivien Cox, The Bad Lord
Byron, Convoy Publications, London,
1949. 2 'Glenda Jackson', in Brian McFarlane,
An Autobiography of British Cmema,
Methuen/ BFI, London, 1997, p.317. 3 T.M., Monthly Film Bulletin, September
1966, p.137.
• Christopher Ricks, 'Undermining Keats',
The New York Review of Books, 17
December, 2009, p.49. 5 'Bright Stars: Sophie Gee on John
Keats and Fanny Brawne Revisited', The
Monthly, December 2009-January 2010,
p.59.
a Fincina Hopgood, 'Lighting the Lamp:
Jane Campion's Bright Star, Metro, no.
163, 2009, p .14.
Metro Magaz1ne 164 • 115