Jane Campion’s Bright Star: agony and the ecstasy

The New Zealander Jane Campion, one of only three female directors to be nominated for an Academy Award and the only one to have ever won a Palme d'Or (for her 1993 film The Piano), has made a much-hailed return to film-making after taking a four-year sabbatical.

Although Campion's new film Bright Star, about the Romantic poet John Keats, failed to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes this year despite being widely tipped to do so, it has still wowed the critics.

Bright Star chronicles the doomed two-year relationship between Keats, who died in 1821 of tuberculosis aged 25, and 'girl next door' Fanny Brawne. The Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan calls it "one of the most moving, most transporting love stories in memory". The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw hailed "a film which I think could be the best of [Campion's] career; an affecting and deeply considered study of the last years in the short life of John Keats, and the ecstasy of loss which suffuses his love affair".

The film's two leads, the Australian actress Abbie Cornish, 27, and the 29-year-old British actor Ben Whishaw, have also been praised for their performances. Cornish, in particular, gives an "outstanding" performance, according to Todd McCarthy in Variety. "She's as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it's possible to be," said the New York Times critic A O Scott, who added it was "perfectly chaste and insanely sexy".

Campion cast Cornish and Whishaw as lovers without the pair meeting. Her gamble paid off, says Turan: "Though not widely known in [the United States], the performers' naturalness and ability allow them to function as our contemporaries... they so know how to be in love on screen that they make this chaste relationship burn like fire".

Campion was inspired to write the screenplay for Bright Star after reading about the star-cross'd love affair in Andrew Motion's 1997 biography of Keats. Motion based much of his theory about the relationship on Keats's own letters to Fanny. Says Campion: "These were no ordinary letters, but the staggeringly honest outpourings from one of the youngest and greatest of the English Romantic poets... For me, it was a story even more romantic and sad than Romeo and Juliet, for being true."

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING
Dave Calhoun, Time Out: "A combination of unstuffy dialogue, wise casting, unselfconscious performances and sensuous but never pretty photography makes Campion’s version of the 19th century feel current but not anachronistic." (Verdict: four stars out of five)

Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times: "What Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats's verbal beauty. There is a shot here of Fanny in a meadow of blue flowers that is so enthralling it beggars description."

A O Scott, the New York Times: "Bright Star... is a romantic movie. The vernacular of popular culture and the somewhat specialised language of literary history assign different meanings to that word, but the achievement of Jane Campion’s learned and ravishing new film is to fuse them, to trace the comminglings and collisions of poetic creation and amatory passion." (Verdict: four stars out of five).