Fridae

For those of us unable to celebrate Valentine’s Day with our loved ones, Bright Star should more than serve as the V-Day movie to watch.

There’s nothing more romantic than the idea of a Romantic poet. They invariably died young from consumption or poverty (or both), were iconoclasts and idealists, and wrote very good poetry which are always useful to woo people with. Cut down in their prime, Romantic poets are preserved like a moth in amber: perfect and immortal.

And such is how we’d like to remember John Keats, the greatest poet of them all. But for a film, how would we want to commemorate the genius and passion of John Keats and his amazing sonnets? Director Jane Campion believes that a biography of Keats’s final three years and his wooing of his fashionable and sharp-witted neighbour (who may or may not have inspired his later sonnets, but was most certainly a spiritual precursor to Coco Chanel) is the best solution.

The conceit may very well work as a lush romance, though there are some difficulties. For a poet whose approach to poetry composition was faltering and deliberate, the tale of love blossoming between poet and muse may come across as too conventional, their congress too unburdened without the false starts and hesitancy that Keats’s love poetry may suggest. Then again, it’s a thrilling experience to see Keats’s odes and sonnets being written on the fly, at the moment of their creation.

What does make Bright Star a great indie film and not just a ho-hum biopic of an artist, is Campion’s attention to visuals and period details. Abbie Cornish appears in a new dress in almost every scene; outdoors sets are brilliantly captured with the light falling just so on the flecks of dew that sparkle just so off the leaves hanging from trees just so. All those picturesque moments will make you sigh again and again.

Credit must also be given to Campion’s framing of the Romantic movement within the social and economic constraints of Regency England. Parts of the movie come across as an intricate Jane Austen story on class, inheritance, economics and career movements of artists, and provides an occasional diversion from the romantic plot.

With a finely told story, brilliantly captured cinematography, toe-tapping soundtrack and lovely acting, Bright Star is to die for.