No one apart from Keats and Jane Campion has ever much liked Fanny Brawne. “She made him ridiculous in the eyes of his friends”, wrote the critic and poet R. H. Stoddard in 1878, after the publication of Keats’s letters to her. “Look at her silhouette, and say if the cold, hard, haughty young woman who stood for that could love poetry.” Charles Armitage Brown, with whom Keats shared a bachelor pad next door to the Brawnes in Hampstead, thought her an interfering flirt and even Keats himself complained that she was “ignorant – monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx”.
The Minx not only inspired the most perfect love letters in the language – “You are always new”, Keats tells her, “You always concentrate my whole senses” – but now Bright Star, written and directed by Campion, Fanny’s new champion, makes those love letters look like utility bills. As nothing is known about Brawne outside Keats’s obsession with her (Fanny’s own letters have not survived), Campion has had to invent her heroine, and she sees her as prickly, poised and quietly dazzling. It is now Fanny, flawlessly played by Abby Cornish, who is obsessed, and the story of her two-year affair with Keats is less about poems than about sewing, and waiting. “Almost all women sewed”, Campion has said in an interview; “they sewed and they waited”.
Like Jane Campion’s earlier films, The Piano (1993) and Portrait of a Lady (1996), Bright Star is a costume drama, but in this instance there is more costume than drama. In many ways Bright Star is a film about clothes, about what you wear while you sew and wait. Fanny is not just a seamstress but a fashion designer whose outré creations, from the “triple-pleated mushroom collar” with which she accessorizes her ball gown, to her witty take on a winter bonnet, would not look out of place on the Vivienne Westwood runway. Fanny’s garments are, she announces, her identity. The poet, on the other hand, Keats (played by Ben Whishaw) explains, “has no identity”, and is “continually filling some other body”.
Fanny, whose body is amply filled already, embroiders pillow-slips, replaces linings, mends holes, reinforces what is wearing thin. The fabric of Keats’s world is less sturdy, and Whishaw plays him as though he were on the verge of vanishing. His brother is dying of tuberculosis, the illness which will shortly kill him, too; he has no money, his poverty is pushing him down the social scale, his poetry receives excoriatingly bad reviews, his love for Fanny feels at times like madness.
Much of the dialogue is lifted verbatim from Keats’s letters, but this does not sound awkward. Whishaw makes these literary meditations seem like the natural sentiments of lovers. “I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem and given away by a novel”, he says. Fanny is not sure what a poem is and to the derision of Brown, a roaring beast in tartan played by Paul Schneider, she asks Keats to give her lessons. ‘Is this really you or are you merely acting?’ Brown snarls as Fanny struggles with a sonnet. The aggressive exchanges between Brown and Brawne are always fun and lead to the finest moment in the film, where Brown sends her, inexplicably, a valentine. Keats is jealous, Fanny is minx-like, and Brown is so baffled by his own behaviour that he can hardly speak. But this is the only acknowledgement of Keats’s emotional range; Whishaw excels at poetic inwardness but there are too few of the famous outbursts, and no sign at all of the man who confessed that “when I am among Women I have evil thoughts”.
Campion’s concern is the whole process of falling in love: its everyday ordinariness, its violence, its precariousness, its damned inconvenience when the lover is first poor, and then dying, and then dead. In such intense states nothing much happens; the seasons change, the cat purrs, the lovers wait in monastic rooms. Next-door neighbours, Keats and Fanny are acutely aware of their proximity: each moves their bed closer to the wall, he watches her in the garden, she wanders into his study with her sewing. He is always shocked by her presence. “You have absorb’d me”, he says. “I have a sensation at the moment as though I was dissolving”, and the scenes in which she herself dissolves when Keats is away from her are wonderfully done, as is their one kiss, surely the single noisiest kiss in cinema history.
Fanny has no sense that the man she so briefly knew will one day be the brighter star; there is no winking at the camera that posterity will sort the whole sorry business out. Keats described Fanny as being “beautiful, elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange”. Bright Star is much the same.
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