Margarida Esteves Pereira Bright Star: Reinventing Romantic Poetry for the Screen

The aim of this essay is to inquire into the way John Keats’s poetry is used in Jane Campion’s film Bright Star, in order to infuse the narrative of John Keats and Fanny Brawne’s love story with a sense of the romantic that transcends contemporary notions of it. Taking into account Campion’s confessed difficulty in reading Keats’s poetry, the paper focuses on the way the film, up to a certain point, reinvents Romantic poetry for the contemporary screen, by making extensive use of the poems and letters of John Keats. It argues that the use of poetry, combined with a romantic visual depiction of the English countryside and with a simple and quiet musical score, reinforces the sense of romantic love that drives this story. At the same time, the essay briefly discusses the film Bright Star in the context of Jane Campion’s filmography, with particular attention to the centrality of the female perspective in her work.

It is a long acknowledged fact that film is a particularly multi-artistic and blended form of art, mixing such diverse art forms as the visual and the performing arts, music, design and architecture, among others. From André Bazin’s ‘defence of mixed cinema’1 to Noël Carroll’s2 exposure of the fallacies of the ‘specificity thesis’, several critics and theorists have dealt with the particularly mixed quality of cinema. Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) brings very vividly to the fore the whole idea of cinema as an interart, in the sense that it invokes such diverse art forms as painting, music, or poetry, in order to enhance the Romanticism the film so blatantly assumes and brings forth for a twenty-first century audience. As The Guardian reviewer of the film notes, ‘[a]ny movie about a romantic poet has to be careful how glowingly it depicts the great outdoors but this film looks unselfconsciously beautiful [...]’.3 The beauty of the film may indeed come to us in the colour harmony the exterior shots of the English countryside evoke, reminding the viewer at times of the colour palette of certain Impressionist paintings – we could think, for example, of Claude Monet’s turn of the century landscapes with irises in the garden at Giverny. In the film, there is, at times, a certain impressionistic quality in

1 André Bazin, ‘In Defense of Mixed Cinema’, in What is Cinema? Volume I, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 53-75. 2 Noël Carroll, ‘The Specificity Thesis’ [from Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory], in Film Theory & Criticism, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 7th edn. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 292-298. 3 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Cannes Film Festival Review’ (15th May 2009), in The Guardian [online], http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/15/jane-campion-bright-star- cannes-film-festival-review. 154 Margarida Esteves Pereira shots of the surroundings of the house, in particular through an emphasis on colour (like the lilac blue in fields of flowers, or the shades of green in the garden, or the light yellow of the summer fields). We may also be compelled to acknowledge the harmonious uplifting effect of Mark Bradshaw’s musical soundtrack, which mixes the rhythms of Keats’s poetry with simple but very slow-paced tunes, in accordance with the general atmosphere of quietness summoned by the film. But it is through well-crafted dialogues that the blatantly romantic plot seeks a correlation with another medium for ‘beautiful’ imagery, that of poetry, as is highlighted by the title of the film, taken from a poem by John Keats dedicated to his beloved Fanny Brawne. In many senses, poetry is one of the main art forms invoked in Bright Star, which may not come as a surprise in a film that is partly based on the life of one of the most prominent of English Romantic poets. Nonetheless, as we intend to argue in this essay, more than being a mere ‘biopic’ of the life of John Keats, the film is based on a romance plot, depicting a very powerful love story, with an element of tragedy at the end. And yet, this is a film where poetry and the poetic are daringly intertwined in the film narrative in ways that emphasize the emotional appeal of the plot and tell the film apart, from our point of view, from other normal ‘heritage’ or ‘post- heritage’4 film dramas, for which Jane Campion is also known, namely, through films like The Piano (1993) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). Up to a certain point, the ‘romantic’ quality of this story can be set up against the prevalent concerns of previous films by Jane Campion, committed as some of them are to exposing the fallacies of romantic love – and we can think of films such as The Portrait of Lady or In the Cut, in this respect; but this concern goes back to her early short films, as is best exemplified by A Girl’s Own Story (1984). On the other hand, this film shows a continuum with Jane Campion’s filmography, both in the way Campion goes back to the territories of the past and of costume drama, as was already mentioned, but also in the way it establishes again the centrality of love in people’s lives. From this point of view, we can say that Bright Star is very close to the themes Jane Campion has developed in her former films. Thus, this paper aims at discussing the way Bright Star evokes the Romantic poetry of John Keats to widen our understanding of this particular romantic love story. In doing so, however, we will argue here, she is never very far from her own thematic preoccupations with women and women’s desire and a certain

4 For a definition and detailed account of the term ‘heritage’ and ‘post-heritage’, see Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).