A chaste affair amid the daffodils
Andrew M Brown on the entrancing story of Keats and Fanny Brawne

6 November 2009

A tubercular Keats (Ben Whishaw) rests with Fanny Brawne, played brilliantly by Abbie Cornish

Bright Star
PG cert, 119 mins

'Would you teach me poetry? I'd like to understand it," asks 18-year-old Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) of her Hampstead neighbour, an unknown poet named John Keats (Ben Whishaw), in Jane Campion's Bright Star.

Campion puts Fanny at the turbulent centre of this delicate and slow-moving love story. Cornish plays her brilliantly, although she looks a bit older than 18. It is both entrancing and, occasionally, affecting to watch determined, bright-eyed Fanny tortured by the delicious agonies of first love and, finally, immobilised by grief.

Keats, in contrast to Fanny, looks thin and weak, as though the consumption that kills his brother, Tom, at the start of the film, is already enfeebling him before he even realises. Still, he reveals a sense of mischief, teasing Fanny and entertaining the Brawnes by performing a humorous country dance. When reciting his poetry - which he does, often - he's deadly serious. He also sports a permanent three-day growth of stubble, which gives him an anachronistic look and brings to mind that Whishaw once played Keith Richards.

With this rendering of Keats, Whishaw improves on his insipid Sebastian Flyte in the disastrous Brideshead. Even though Keats was a Cockney poet, accused in his lifetime of making "Cockney rhymes", Whishaw reveals if anything a very slight northern lilt in his voice.

On the whole one feels that Campion, the director, is more interested in Fanny. At least she is choosing to tell the story through Fanny's experience. At first Keats thinks this girl, a student of fashion, is frivolous, a "minx". Fanny admits that her knowledge is limited to sewing and stitching and the "triple-pleated mushroom collar". Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats's devoted helper and protector - he owns Wentworth Place in Hampstead, where Keats lodges - fears that romantic love will drive off the poet's muse.

If Keats, the former surgeon's apprentice, should fall in love and marry, Brown warns, he'll end up "slaving away at medicine 15 hours a day, and for what?" So Brown jealously discourages the love affair and does his utmost to belittle Fanny's high ambition of understanding the mind of a poet, and to show up her ignorance. "She makes a religion of flirting," he tells Keats, who replies: "There is a holiness to the heart's affections." (Campion lifted that line, like a lot of the exactly-right-sounding dialogue in the film, from one of Keats's letters.)

Fanny, in fact, is deadly serious, committed to Keats despite the opposition of her mother (Kerry Fox) who is understandably worried. "Mr Keats knows that he cannot like you," says Mrs Brawne. "He has no living and no income."

Mrs Brawne does at least sympathise with her daughter. As do Fanny's younger siblings, sister Toots (delightful little Edie Martin) and brother Samuel (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), who hover in the background and spy on the lovers. Possibly, lack of privacy explains why the love affair remains chaste, the lovers securely clothed throughout, since they never get any privacy.

Mr Brown, however, cannot understand this kind of love as anything but a distraction from the work in hand, the high art. He recognises only Keats's immense talent and he treats it as his property. Schneider, a burly American actor who plays Brown with a strong Scottish accent, conveys Brown's internal conflicts. He hates himself, really: his worship of Keats as a kind of superior being only serves to remind him of his own inadequacies. Later he gets Abigail, a maid-servant, pregnant; we see how shabbily he treats her. In the end, he fails his friend - and he knows it - because he backs out of accompanying Keats on his final journey.

The gentle pace of Bright Star starts to gain urgency from the point at which someone says, on a snowy night, in an anxious tone: "Mr Keats has gone to London with no coat." Keats returns with a chill, coughing blood (and not just a drop, either: we see his blood-soaked shirt floating in the sink). Friends including the painter Joseph Severn gather at Wentworth to raise money to send the poet to the milder climate of Rome. This injects drama into the love affair, since, for reasons that are unclear, Keats refuses to let Fanny travel with him. "I doubt," he says, "that we will ever see each other again on this earth." All the Brawnes sense the impending tragedy, even the children. There's a touching scene where Toots, Fanny's little sister, hands a little gift to Keats and whispers: "I love you."

Keats composed "The Eve of St Agnes", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Ode to a Nightingale" and quite a few other major poems around this time. Campion and her cinematographer, Greig Fraser, create a setting for this intense creativity in simply framed images of nature - woodland walks across the Heath, fields of bluebells and daffodils, blossom on the trees, all lit by bright sunshine. And you have the Regency costumes - bonnets and high Empire waists - that are familiar from Jane Austen adaptations. But these incidentals hardly intrude and the overall effect is of understatement and simplicity.