bright threads

Australian costume designer Janet Patterson has collaborated with Jane Campion on The Piano and Portrait of a Lady both earning her Academy Award nominations (she also received one for Gillian Armstrong's Oscar & Lucinda).

In Bright Star, the costume design becomes an intricate part of character as Fanny creates and sews her own clothing. Keats wears a signature blue jacket for much of the film.

Jane Campion noted in an interview for Tribeca Film that Fanny's outfits change from bold and ruffly to more muted and understated to finally black, in the somber closing scene, because "she's under his influence .... We imagined that as he got more ill, it was probably toned down. As a fact, she used to dress up for him. (Campion gets up and imitates what Fanny would've done at the window.) 'Oh, I've got a new dress sewn. Come to the window and I'll show it to you.' I do imagine it became a little more sober."

Producer Jan Chapman noted, "Janet Patterson ... works a lot from character and story, rather than thinking, 'That's a great costume, and I'll put it on that person.' She tries to work out their world and what they might've had and also she works with fabrics and textures, also knowing she would have control of the colors and look of the sets. What I love about Janet as a designer is that she works for story, not just for the look. And yet she's a deeply stylish person."

starry eyed

In Wislawa Szymborska's Nobel Lecture, "The Poet and the World," she remarks that the work of poets is "hopelessly unphotogenic." Jane Campion's Bright Star is an exception: an exceptional movie about poetry and the passionate romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Campion successfully showed the life of another poet Janet Frame in Angel at My Table and brought a modern perspective to The Portrait of a Lady, an underrated adaptation of Henry James. The focus in Bright Star is appropriately much tighter than Campion's previous work, resisting autobiography or much back-story. The story immediately plunges into the passion of Brawne and Keats with its tragic results.

It is a breakthrough performance for Australian actress Abbie Cornish as Fanny. Throughout the film, she is vibrant, alive and in-love to the point of sickness. Her final scenes, including an incredibly raw breakdown, are haunting. She is well-matched by the sinewy and handsome Ben Whishaw (who was quite good as Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited). Their romantic chemistry is often palpable. The intensity can be attributed to Campion's restraint. Sure, there are butterflies flitting about and stolen kisses under canopies, but the film is also grounded in the darker aspects of the human heart.

Bright Star is lensed lovingly by Greig Fraser and the score by Mark Bradshaw is never overpowering. The film is a respectful ode to the work of Keats, including his process of writing and his modest influence on literature at the time (he ended up, of course, being an immense posthumous influence for many), without drowning in what could have been both maudlin and saccharine. ***1/2

-Jeffery Berg

The love letters and poems by Keats are available in book form here.