A Romantic romance

Jane Campion on Bright Star, her telling of the love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne

POETRY IN MOTION: Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw

If John Keats’ poetry was Romantic in the literary sense, his life story was quintessentially lower-case “r” romantic, with the poetic genius dying practically alone in Rome from tuberculosis at the young age of 25, far from his Hampstead neighbour Fanny Brawne, with whom he’d conducted a secretive and largely forbidden love affair.

The last few years of Keats’ life, before he was recognized as perhaps the greatest poet of his time, and specifically his relationship with Brawne, are the subject of Bright Star, a new film from famed New Zealand director Jane Campion. A biopic of a 19th-century poet might sound like the stuffiest of costume dramas, but Campion’s film is light and beautiful, a truly human story, made with an artist’s touch, that avoids the dreary clichés of the genre.

Keats’ view of the creative process seems to have sculpted Campion’s approach in subtle ways. “Keats says in the film, ‘Poets aren’t poetical. They’re the least poetical things on earth,’” says Campion, speaking to the Mirror at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “In a way, I think he’s trying to say that they are a kind of mere medium, or conduit. That the less personality they have, the better, because they’re kind of a pure medium for lending their consciousness to something else. He often describes like he’s watching a little sparrow pecking at some gravel outside a window. It’s as if he is the sparrow, it’s as if he’s doing the pecking. That he completely loses the sense of the different self. The more completely you can do that, the better a poet you can be. So he’s saying that, in his view, poets don’t have a personal sense of themselves. They are just these creatures that pick up the messages.

“My goal was to somehow feel a little bit of that magic that he talks about. I wanted it to have that feeling, that it should play on your sensations, that you shouldn’t be thinking it but feeling it.”

Keats (Ben Whishaw) is portrayed as fragile but funny and real, but if anything, the film’s real subject is Brawne (Abbie Cornish), herself an artistic and shrewd soul. As Keats was a poor poet, he was not considered an appropriate prospect for Brawne, but she fell for him nevertheless, giving their story the feeling of a Jane Austen novel. And as an unmarried woman, Brawne is accompanied by her siblings at all times, making the romance even more difficult.

“No one was ever alone,” Campion says. “There’s only very few scenes where Fanny and Keats were alone. The whole point of society at the time was to keep the people who couldn’t be betrothed to each other apart so they didn’t do what Fanny and Keats did, which was grow attachments that couldn’t be undone. And for me it was fantastic, really, the story of how they shared two halves of the same house and how their access to each other must have been so easy. They went right under the radar, nobody imagined for a second that smart old Fanny, who knew what she needed in a husband and in order to have a good wardrobe, would ever be such a fool to fall in love with Keats, who she knew didn’t have any money. But she did, to everyone’s surprise.”

BRIGHT STAR OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 2