Bright Star
Feb. 20th, 2018 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJane Campion's Bright Star is one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen, purely in terms of the composition of the shots. The movie tells the love story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne, but it's also a love letter to the flowers of England, the play of light through long white curtains, butterflies fluttering in muslin-lidded glass jars and dying when their three allotted days on this earth are spent, and then their shattered yet still beautiful wings are swept up off the clean dark floor.
It's that melancholy edge that keeps it from being saccharine. A thing of beauty, Keats says,
"is a joy forever:
its loveliness increases; it will never
pass into nothingness; but still will keep
a bower quiet for us, and a sleep
full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
This is the excerpt that Campion has Fanny Brawne read soon after she meets Keats, when she's trying to decide "whether he's an idiot or not" (as her little sister explains to the bookseller), and it occurs to me that it's a sort of mission statement for the movie - and the movie both reflects it, capturing the beauty of butterflies and flowering apple trees and white sheets flapping in the breeze, and questions it. The butterflies down, the flowers fade away; even the white sheets go limp in the soaking rain.
On a spiritual level Keats might be right, but in practical terms things of beauty pass away all the time - a fact that is amply illustrated by Keats' own life, and early death - which is of course part of why Keats' poetry is so moving: it seems so calm and stately on the surface, and yet there's this defiance to it, he's spurning the thought of his own transience and swift-approaching death.
Ben Whishaw does a great job as Keats - in fact everyone in this movie is great; the actors playing Fanny's little brother & sister are wonderful too, so natural. But Fanny herself is my favorite, because she's so uncompromisingly herself, smart and emotional and tart-tongued and completely whole-hearted in her love once she's given it.
Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown accuses Fanny of being a flirt whose head is entirely taken up with fashion, and the thing is, his criticisms are not wholly untrue. She is interested in poetry mainly because it interests Keats. (There's a painful scene where Brown asks her about her opinion of Milton, mostly to make her look bad by making it clear that her claims to have read Milton are false.) She loves to dance, and she especially loves fashion and sewing and spends hours making and designing her own clothes - like the triple-pleated mushroom collar she's wearing in an early scene.
But while his criticisms may (sometimes) technically be true, they are also wrong - because there's nothing wrong with any of those things; because we only see an interest in flirting and fashion as wrong because they are considered too feminine, too flighty, because a girl who flirts is a girl who wants things and expresses that want and that offends against the idea that women should never want too much. Brown certainly sees nothing wrong flirting when he's the one doing it.
So what if Fanny hasn't read Milton? What's wrong with liking to dance? And as for her interest in fashion and stitchery - well, Fanny defends herself better than I could: "My stitching has more merit and admirers than your two scribblings put together," she tells Keats and Brown, and then twists the knife: "And I can make money from it."
I could say more - I haven't even said anything about the love story, or the way the poetry is interwoven in the movie, or the use of light - but this is already getting long, and in any case, at some point there's nothing left to say except, "It's good. You should see it for yourself."
It's that melancholy edge that keeps it from being saccharine. A thing of beauty, Keats says,
"is a joy forever:
its loveliness increases; it will never
pass into nothingness; but still will keep
a bower quiet for us, and a sleep
full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
This is the excerpt that Campion has Fanny Brawne read soon after she meets Keats, when she's trying to decide "whether he's an idiot or not" (as her little sister explains to the bookseller), and it occurs to me that it's a sort of mission statement for the movie - and the movie both reflects it, capturing the beauty of butterflies and flowering apple trees and white sheets flapping in the breeze, and questions it. The butterflies down, the flowers fade away; even the white sheets go limp in the soaking rain.
On a spiritual level Keats might be right, but in practical terms things of beauty pass away all the time - a fact that is amply illustrated by Keats' own life, and early death - which is of course part of why Keats' poetry is so moving: it seems so calm and stately on the surface, and yet there's this defiance to it, he's spurning the thought of his own transience and swift-approaching death.
Ben Whishaw does a great job as Keats - in fact everyone in this movie is great; the actors playing Fanny's little brother & sister are wonderful too, so natural. But Fanny herself is my favorite, because she's so uncompromisingly herself, smart and emotional and tart-tongued and completely whole-hearted in her love once she's given it.
Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown accuses Fanny of being a flirt whose head is entirely taken up with fashion, and the thing is, his criticisms are not wholly untrue. She is interested in poetry mainly because it interests Keats. (There's a painful scene where Brown asks her about her opinion of Milton, mostly to make her look bad by making it clear that her claims to have read Milton are false.) She loves to dance, and she especially loves fashion and sewing and spends hours making and designing her own clothes - like the triple-pleated mushroom collar she's wearing in an early scene.
But while his criticisms may (sometimes) technically be true, they are also wrong - because there's nothing wrong with any of those things; because we only see an interest in flirting and fashion as wrong because they are considered too feminine, too flighty, because a girl who flirts is a girl who wants things and expresses that want and that offends against the idea that women should never want too much. Brown certainly sees nothing wrong flirting when he's the one doing it.
So what if Fanny hasn't read Milton? What's wrong with liking to dance? And as for her interest in fashion and stitchery - well, Fanny defends herself better than I could: "My stitching has more merit and admirers than your two scribblings put together," she tells Keats and Brown, and then twists the knife: "And I can make money from it."
I could say more - I haven't even said anything about the love story, or the way the poetry is interwoven in the movie, or the use of light - but this is already getting long, and in any case, at some point there's nothing left to say except, "It's good. You should see it for yourself."
no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:51 pm (UTC)//FACEPALM
no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 04:19 am (UTC)beautiful
sad
lovely.
It made me cry.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 09:23 am (UTC)I am so glad. I have only seen this movie once, but I loved it.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:41 pm (UTC)I hope you like it if you see it! It's quite sad, though, being about Keats and all, so be prepared.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 11:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 02:58 pm (UTC)I guess I should see this movie, since clearly the world wants me to cry about Keats some more.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-21 04:26 pm (UTC)But even if you weren't already into crying about Keats, I would recommend the movie just because it's so good. It has probably introduced many people to the harsh yet beautiful world of crying about Keats.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-24 10:38 am (UTC)I love how picturesque this film is, and how it manages to be so pretty without (I'd argue) romanticising or glossing over the unlovely parts of their lives. Or without implying that the existence of unhappiness and suffering means that Fanny and Keats' pursuit of loveliness (their respective creative endeavours, their relationship with each other) is misguided and pointless. So Fanny and Keats don't get to live happily ever after, but I feel like the film affirms that they were optimistic rather than pragmatic about their future.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-24 06:55 pm (UTC)And I agree: I think there's a sense in the film that loveliness and beauty are worthwhile even if they don't last very long. And perhaps (although the film never quotes this specific line, I think) that Keats was onto something when he claimed that beauty is truth, truth beauty, at least with regard to love: when Fanny and Keats pursue their love for each other, it's true and beautiful even if it's not wise in a worldly sense, even though they might never have been able to marry even if Keats had lived.