Punctuated by a beautiful script detailing the last days of Romantic poet John Keats' life through the lens of his troubled and tragic love affair with the young Fanny Brawne, Jane Campion's Bright Star is also a true achievement of aesthetics; never has onscreen love looked so colorfully nuanced. Foreknowledge of Keats' upcoming death by tuberculosis only makes witnessing the affair a more desperate experience for the viewer, the feeling of dreading the inevitable even as one hopes that things can somehow turn in a happier direction (the kind of wish-fulfillment unabashedly on display in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, for example) for the characters being depicted. But alas, no; this is no alternate history: rather, it is a celebration of one of the greats from a very personal, intimate perspective.
From their first moment onscreen together, Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw perfectly navigate Fanny and John's obsession with one another on their road to love, and Campion displays this for us in fantastic yet subtle displays of brightness; for example, when Fanny receives a letter from Keats in which he likens her to a butterfly, she employs her siblings in capturing butterflies from the fields in an effort to turn her bedroom into a butterfly sanctuary, and we see her lounging on her bed, butterflies everywhere, literally lost in love. The butterflies are used brilliantly as metaphor; when Fanny's mother comes to try to rouse her daughter into action, she becomes overwhelmed by the butterflies and has to leave the room, closing the door quickly behind her as to not let any of them out into the rest of the house. Thus, Fanny is shut away with her obsession, her family not knowing quite what to do with her.
Early in the film, as John Keats is trying to explain to Fanny the nature of poetry, he responds to her desire to learn how to "work poetry out" with a beautiful analogy to the experience of being in a lake. When we jump into a lake, Keats explains, we are not immediately concerned with swimming back to shore; we want, rather, to enjoy, even for just a little while, the feeling of being in the lake, of existing in the water, still blissfully caught between the act of immersion and the act of return. Poetry, then, is not about figuring out the answer to a puzzle, but is rather about being lost in the puzzle itself, letting the words create an experience all their own. And this, ultimately, is the joy of Bright Star: the experience of getting lost in Jane Campion's remarkably beautiful and vividly rendered world, even for just a couple of hours.
