Bright Star

Bright Star

This costume drama/biopic about the poet Jim Keats is well executed and  has great performances from the leads and a great directing. The  naturally lit interiors and exteriors give a crude but beautiful images  to this somptuous film.

However, I may just get bored by costume dramas because I find them  laborious and somewhat "impersonal". They mostly reflect what the  paintings of the time looked like. Their execution is wonderful and it  takes a lot of mastery to handle them at this level. But, their subject  and matters are too classical for my tastes. As in paintings, I prefer  contemporary Art and subject. My favorite painters are Dali, de Chirico,  Magritte, Munch, the expressionists, Warhol, etc.

My two favorite costume dramas are Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Eric Rohmer's Marquise of O.  Birght Statr is a good film well made and exquisite to loof at but it  won't take the third place of my top costume dramas which is held by Marie-Antoinette.

Recommendations: Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Duel

Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)

THE SCOOP
Director: Jane Campion
Plot: The drama based on the three-year romance between 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which was cut short by Keats' untimely death at age 25.

Genre: Biography/Drama/Romance
Awards: Nom. for 1 Oscar - best costume design. Nom. for Golden Palm (Cannes).
Runtime: 119min
Rating: PG for thematic elements, some sensuality, brief language and incidental smoking.

IN RETROSPECT
Jane Campion continues her fascination with the period drama. Her latest film, Bright Star, premiered at Cannes and is in the running for an Oscar for Best Costume Design. Best known for the acclaimed picture, The Piano (1993), Campion now shifts her attention to John Keats (Ben Whishaw), a famous English poet who lived in the 19^th century. Falling short of making a biographical picture of Keats that only literature scholars will salivate on, Campion decided to film Bright Star from the perspective of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), the woman who fell in love with Keats in a secret (and forbidden) relationship.

Keats was a dreamer. He wrote poetry as a form of expressing hypothetical desires – the wish for a perfect world and an utopian understanding of what constituted beauty and love. He had little income and remained an outsider who was oblivious to cultural norms. In short, the world was himself and he was his own world. On the other hand, Brawne was a realist. She was born into a middle-class family, lived satisfactorily within her own means, and passed her time through stitching elaborately designed clothing.

Her love affair with Keats grew slowly with occasional chance meetings and blossomed into a comfortable embracement that appeared awkward, at best, to outsiders. The film’s other major character was Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a zealous and overprotective friend of Keats, who tried to separate them. Campion draws out the tensions among the three main characters without going overboard into theatrics. Her direction is sensitive and understated. And this is important for a picture as refined as Bright Star.

Edited with a pace equivalent to a morning stroll in the wilderness, Bright Star may be too refined for mainstream tastes as Campion indulges in a visual style that emphasizes on the regality of the period e.g. stately costumes worn by the leads, and the blissful nature of life through silent sequences in which characters interact non-verbally. A good example is a sequence which shows Keats and Brawne flirting with each other as they walk behind the latter’s younger sister, Toots. Whenever Toots turns around, they would freeze in a comical position.

In addition, Campion’s screenplay is more “textual” than most films of similar genre. At best, the dialogue between the characters is poetic and beautifully written. Sometimes it gets too abstract though, and coupling with the thick English accent used by the characters, it may be difficult to interpret what was said. Bright Star can be appreciated on its own terms and for Cornish's excellent performance, but only a select few can fully embrace (and enjoy) what Campion has accomplished. I am most definitely not one of them.

SCORE: 7/10
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Recommendations: Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), The Visitor

Singapore's Most Prolific Film Blogger @ www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com

Last updated: 2010-05-30 02:51:38 by eternality_tan

Bright Star

There's obviously something about Ben Whishaw that suggests bygone eras. Having made a splash with 2006's Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, he then appeared as Sebastian Flyte in the 2008 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Clearly there's something about his slight frame that makes him the perfect choice for period dramas.

Bright Star makes it easy to see why. Jane Campion may be the big name behind this biopic of Romantic poet John Keats and his love affair with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, but it's Whishaw who truly makes it shine. His portrayal of Keats remains whimsical yet robust throughout, and its as powerful in its understatement as the poet was in his extravagant Romanticism.

That's not to say that Campion is entirely forgotten. Her vision of the period is refreshingly earthy, rejecting the familiar pomp and circumstance of period dramas in favor of an intimate realism, and it pays off in turning Keats's story into an unusually personal one. The occasional lingering over visual images lends it a curious poeticism, too.

The story itself is simple, but rooted in the true facts of Keats's short life. It follows Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) rather than Keats himself, a young amateur seamstress living in Hampstead. For three brief years she pursues a love affair with Mr. Keats, the young, doe-eyed poet who lives next door with their neighbor Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider, recently seen in Away We Go).

As their love affair deepens, however, so Keats's health deteriorates - and you just know that this is one romance that isn't fated to end happily.

Clearly Bright Star's main focus is on the affair between Brawne and Keats himself, but Campion manages to turn their story into a curious love triangle with the abrasive Mr. Brown. Brown clearly has feelings for Fanny Brawne too, although his gruff exterior is too harsh to allow them to be spoken; more importantly, he also harbors a deep respect and love for his friend Keats, a love that he only fully realises when he stands to lose him forever.

The narrative rests firmly upon this trio as they pull each other in opposite directions, and Whishaw, Cornish and Schneider are more than up to the task. Schneider's Scottish accent may occasionally slump into straight-out parody, but all three tackle the strong emotions with honesty and subtlety.

Bright Star could all too easily have turned into a overly-Romantic period melodrama, but instead - thanks to three fine performances, and Campion's grittily arty direction - it makes Keats's life shine once again from screen. Unusually smart and tender, with barely a faerie queen in sight.

Booze Revooze: A Drinker’s Skewed View of BRIGHT STAR

Final Proof: 1 Shot

You know how you drink with John Keats? Sure he died going on 300 years ago so he doesn’t have a whole lot to offer up by way of conversation and he really isn’t super interesting but at least he doesn’t drink much and you can steal his drinks easily and after a couple bottles of wine you don’t have to pretend to pay attention—you can just nod off whenever you want and wake up refreshed another round. That’s the way it is with Bright Star.

i had a bottle and a half of red before i saw this and, to be honest, i slept through the middle third but Miss Demeanor is a fan of everything Jane Eyre wrote and tells me the scenery was shot superbly.

i was awake long enough to notice that Abbie Cornish (as Frances ‘Fanny’ Brawne) does a great job of acting boring and also does a great job of looking plain when she’s really pretty hot. Paul Schneider (Charles Armitage Brown) was kind of annoying because he did so well injecting life into his character that i couldn’t doze off until his appearances thinned out.

Buzz Kills (Watch Out for Spoilers)

Sex: 0 Shots

Miss D tells me i fell asleep during the kissing scenes and she insists they were hot.

Also hot is Abbie Cornish (27). She has these cool double moles on the left side of her face so when you get bored—and trust me, you will get bored—you can look for those moles in the different scenes. Hell, if you watch it on DVD you could even make a drinking game out of it:  take a double shot every time you see the double moles.








Here’s Ben Whishaw (29), who plays John Keats:

Drink: 0 Shots

Get real.

Rock & Roll: 0 Shots…

…though according to Miss D, rock and roll wouldn’t exist without the romantic poets. i told her rock wouldn’t exist without spirituals and the blues, but she stood by her guns and i get to sleep with her so there was no way i was going to mess that up. As you’re not in the same sheets, you bring it up with her.

Boring Technical Crap

Written by: Jane Campion

Directed by: Jane Campion

Starring

Abbie Cornish – Frances ‘Franny’ Brawne

Ben Whishaw – John Keats

Paul Schneider – Charles Armitage Brown

Bottom Line

Don’t see it unless you have sleeping problems or are a fan of Jane Eyre crap.

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Al K Hall<br />
Functional Alcoholic Slurperson<br />
(No, REALLY. Google &amp;quot;Slurperson&amp;quot; if you don't believe me.)

Last updated: 2010-04-01 21:39:22 by user08

BRIGHT STAR

***½

This uncommonly un-stolid biopic – of young, ailing Keats and his star-crossed love – seems to have been pretty universally greeted as Jane Campion’s return to form (discounting the romantics among us who will scramble for reasons to champion her moderately erotic, distinctly unthrilling 2003 throwback to a genre that died with straight-to-VHS releases). It takes nearly an hour of screentime for the leads to settle into the period – arguably Ben Whishaw never does completely, whereas after asserting her ahead-of-her-time headstrong-ness in about eight scenes too many, Abbie Cornish relaxes. The plot is tragic-biographical-period-romance-by-numbers, but Campion imbues it with poetry (of the cinematic kind) at every chance, immeasurably helped by Greig Fraser’s delicate lighting.

Last updated: 2010-03-20 04:27:24 by user06

Bright Star

Starring: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw
Drama: 2008, Rated PG


This is a period drama set in 1800's london and is the true story of Fannie Brawne (Cornish) who falls in love with writer John Keats (Whishaw). Initially, John thinks not much of her kindness to him while his brother is dying and her subsequent interest in poetry piques his interest. John's friend and Fannie have an utter dislike for each other but despite this John is smitten. Their love can go no further because Keats does not make an income and therefore does not have the money it would take to marrie Fannie.

• I got this movie because Abbie Cornish is in it. I think she is beautiful and quite a talented actress. I also like love stories.
• She did a great job in this movie but nothing much could help the fact that the movie was dry and quite boring for the most part.
• It just went on and on and to be honest I shut it off probably missing the last 10 minutes or so because something was coming on TV that I wanted to watch. Instead of finishing it later I just figured I wasn't missing much and called it a day.

2 Stars

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Just Me

Bright Star

I give the movie: 4.0/5

Bright Star tells the true tale of 19th Century poet, John Keats, and his heartbreaking love story with his teenage sweetheart, Fanny Brawne. Keats was a struggling poet in his short lifespan of 25 years old, but after his untimely death, he was considered one of the most inspiring romantic poets of his time.

Jane Campion wrote and directed this beautiful film about first love - it's giddy infatuation, it's stubbornness, and it's undying devotion. Every frame is realised in poetic detail, and the scenes seem to be as lyrical as the verses from Keats' poems, which we get glimpses of narration throughout the film.

While Ben Whishaw is competent in his tortured portrayal as the young poet, it is Abbie Cornish as his passionate love interest that is both his real-life 'bright star', as well as the film's. Her heart-wrenching performance is inspiring to watch, including the talented supporting cast who make the whole love story a wonder to watch.

FINAL SAY

Destined to be largely ignored by the mainstream audience because of its source material, I still urge lovers of literature - or believers of love, for that matter - to take a look at this beautiful film.

Wilson Ng - http://wilsoniscurious.blogspot.com/

Last updated: 2010-03-13 23:48:14 by wilsoniscurious

Bright Star: A thing of beauty

Bright Star, Australian director Jane Campion's latest gift to movie-goers, outshines anything The Movie Slut has seen at the multiplex for ...well, as long as she can remember.

You got your poetry. You got your music. Mozart! You got your period costumes. You got scenery. Lush and swoon-worthy. 

As poet John Keats, the subject of this biopic, might say, It is a movie of sensations rather than thought, though those who wish to think about the fragility of life and the frustrations of love in a time of tuberculosis can ruminate to their brain's content.

Bright Star is a joy, if not forever, than at least for one hour and fifty-nine minutes.

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See you at the movies, The Movie Slut

Bright Star

Jane Campion says she made a movie about John Keats because she “was terrified of poetry”. A tricky poem was like a spider in a high corner of her brain; making meaning hard to reach; staining her enjoyment. But Keats proved a good teacher. As he says in the movie: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” Bright Star is about a love of verse.

An impoverished Keats is a lodger at the Brawne household in 1818. His poetry has not sold well. He shares a bachelor parlour with his friend Charles Brown and spends his days, like most writers, staring at a blank page the way a sniper watches an open window. Then one day his landlady’s daughter takes an interest in his poems. Her name is Fanny Brawne and she dresses like a rare orchid. She speaks to Keats with a directness he finds intriguing. She wants to understand his work. Since Keats lacks funds, she agrees to pay him to be her poetry tutor. She will become Keats’s muse, and the “Bright Star” of his most rapturous sonnet.

“Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art/ Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night…No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable/ Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast…” In those lines – that mixture of headiness and eroticism – Jane Campion finds her movie. The love between John Keats and Fanny Brawne is chaste, unyielding and tragic. Like Keats’s poem, it conjures a feeling like taking your last breath; that special awareness that comes with sensing mortality. There is no sex in the movie, but the physical connection between the two leads is palpable. Their every kiss is like a resuscitation. Their every touch pierces skin.

Ben Whishaw plays Keats as a bookish man with a roaring heart. There’s an intensity about him, but nothing threatening. He’s a man who could look right through you if he were reading. But he’s also present – the way people are when they have experienced death at a young age. He isn’t sentimental, or mawkish. Rather, he’s someone who has a passion in life, and who is loved because of that passion. When Jane Campion films Whishaw sitting, musing, by a tree, another actor might look fey or ridiculous. Whishaw looks real, as if he really were receiving inspiration. Even his consumptive coughing fits avoid the ominous-cough cliché.

Abbie Cornish, faced with the more difficult task of embodying a muse, goes the practical route. Fanny Brawne isn’t an inscrutable beauty, or a tantalising enigma, she’s a young woman who understands John Keats. Cornish smiles too knowingly for a waif; she smiles like a card sharp. Again, there’s no trace of sentimentality. Her feelings for Keats strike her like a hammer striking an anvil. When he dies, her tears are searing. Cornish looks at Whishaw throughout as if, when she was around him, she could see the blood moving through his body. When he’s sick, it’s as if she can see the sickness. The final meeting between the two, when Fanny begs John to take her with him to Italy, is heart-breaking because they both know it’s their final meeting. It’s mutual awareness that makes them kin.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever/ Its loveliness increases, it will never/ Pass into nothingness… What Bight Star captures is the ecstasy of love: the part that’s like a great poem. There are easier things in life than love and poetry – accepting mystery is hard – but the rewards are ample. Keats’s metaphor of “diving in a lake” is apt because it’s dangerous. If you refuse to swim for shore, you could drown. But that’s only if you give up. What Jane Campion celebrates in Bright Staris the urge to grasp intangibles: whether you’re struck by a face or a verse, if you pursue that impulse, you discover life.

Campion captures the sine curve of romantic experience

Keats's romance with Fanny Brawne and final days are brought to lovely life in Jane Campion's new film, Bright Star. He had TB, though it's never named. When he had become very ill, they sent him to Rome. How foolish! Its climate isn't healthy, though it might have seemed so compared to Hampstead. The house where Keats lived in Hampstead for two years and was in love with Fanny Brawne and wrote some of his has just been restored.

Campion's film may not be a deep investigation of poetical genius, but it's delicate and alive and infinitely touching. There's a delightful litte rosy-cheeked girl, and good use is made of cats. The handsome Regency house was then divided into two, one side occupied by Keats and his landlord and possessive companion Charles Brown, the other by a family called Brawne. He fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and she with him. She is creative in her own way, a brilliant seamstress and designer of clothing who was inventive with fabrics. She didn't know much about poetry but to go by the film, she crammed the classics to be able to talk to Keats and read all his poems and memorized many passages. They recite them back and forth to each other, which may be artificial, but you don't mind, because the poetry is their love, it bloomed through their love and expresses it. Until he began coughing blood and ceased to write because he was suddenly too ill, Keats wrote some of his best work in Hampstead, in love with Fanny Brwwne.

They express their love in long sweet kisses, and walking hand in hand. This too is artificial but a fitting symbolic expression of the ecstasy and swoons of romantic poetry.

Sometimes the final credits define the experience of a film and of its audience. You have to love a film over whose final credits the wispy, winsome Whishaw is heard softly reading the whole of the Ode to a Nightingale, right to the end, and you have to respect an audience in an American cineplex when many of its members sit still to hear Keats's masterpiece down to the final words, "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?" Can you imagine having known a person with such extravagant gifts? Campion doesn't get too much in the way of our own imagining. She just lets it happen, lets the cats wander in and out, and thus captures the sine curve of romantic experience, its extremes of joy and despair that are so poignantly focused in the life of this penniless English boy who died at twenty-five, thinking himself a failure, and left behind some of the finest poetry in the language.

Abbie Cornish plays Fanny, Ben Wishaw John Keats, Paul Schneider plays Charles Brown. The little rosy-cheeked sister, Margaret "Toots" Brawne, is played by Edie Martin. Brown is the villain of the piece, because he jealously guards Keants from Fanny, whom he thinks is a silly girl who only sews and flirts. He's getting in the way of romantic love! And Schneider can't help but seem obtrusive here. Brown redeems himself later when, having gotten the sweet Irish servant girl Abigail (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) with child, he does the right thing and marries her.

Fanny's mother says she can't marry Keats, because he has no money, but he proposes, and she accepts, and when the liebestod begins, there's no way of denying his happiness or Fanny's, or the sadness and devotion that made her wear the gold engagement band for the rest of her life. Campion's film offers no profound insights into the poetic process. But how can it? Though Fanny asks Keats to give her "lessons" in poetry, its appreciation, like its creation, must be instinctive and cannot be explained, particularly not the ethereal romantic kind. Wishaw's delicate and enigmatic quality is a satisfying image to hang our fantasies on.

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Vincent Snavely