CRITICAL ws

BRIGHT STAR AND POETS IN FILM

ad, ad D an angerous

to know - BUT NOT ALWAYS

Brian McFarlane takes Jane Campion's latest film as his starting point for examining the cinematic representation

of poets and their poetry.

ou have to be famous for film-

makers to want to turn your

life into a biopic, and if you care

about accuracy in relation to the

'facts', then it's probably in your

interests to have been dead for quite

a long time. Take, for instance, Lord

Byron, who also had the advantage of a

spectacular off-page life and who seems to

have been represented more times on film

than any other major poet. But I guess no

one goes to biopics with the expectation of

documentary detail about the lives that are

the1r putative subjects.

Biop1cs were a staple of film-going as far

back as the 1930s, with films depicting the

struggles of scientists (The Story of Louis

Pasteur [William Dieterle, 1935) or Madame

Curie [Mervyn LeRoy, 1943], for instance), or

composers (usually tosh, but fun), or sporting

heroes. The genre hasn't been so common 1n

recent years, though there were respectable

goes at Cole Porter (De-Lovely [Irwin Winkler,

2004]) and Alfred Kinsey (Kmsey [Bill Condon,

2004]). At its most popular, it offers ready-

made material for film narrative in the sense

of an overall trajectory that Involves struggles

11 0 • Metro Magaz1ne 164

for recognition and the convincing of scepti-

cal or self-interested others, the interweaving

of the emotional and professional lives of the

protagonist, and the move towards some kind

of gratifying climax. The most one is likely

to get from biopics is a genre entertainment,

with long-established conventions, in which,

at best, some sense of the informing impulses

of the 'life' emerges. Biopics are rarely about

failure, and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009),

despite our knowing the unhappy outcome

for John Keats, is no exception.

In fact, Bright Star is really as much a tender

romance as it 1s a biopic. It led me, though,

to wonder about the difficulty of representing

writers on screen. There's a limit to how long

we want to watch someone sitting earnestly

at a desk with quill poised over the paper

(like George Sand/Merle Oberon in A Song

to Remember [Charles Vidor, 1945]) or, more

up to date, hand hovering over the typewriter

or Its latter-day descendant, the keyboard.

Writers can be a bit intractable when it comes

to showing them at work, compared, say, with

singers, dancers or painters, whose art is more

susceptible to the visual. If writers in general

offer a challenge to so pre-eminently visual an

art form as film, poets in particular may be still

harder nuts to crack. We'd hardly want to go to

the cinema to see pages of Paradise Lost line

by line on the screen. At least a narrative poem

such as 'The Man from Snowy River' offers

something in the way of plot, should anyone

dec1de to film the life of A.B. (Banjo) Paterson,

but how about a lyric poet, a poet who deals in

emotional utterance and expresses himself 1n

terms at a remove from mundane 'meaning'?

How can/does film go about giving any sense

of what motivates a poet, let alone rendenng

the product of such source Impulses?

The most likely answer would seem to lie

in film's power to render some of the verbal

effects of the poetry on the page in terms of

1ts own capacity for visual poetry. This is not

the same as simply looking for a visual way

of transliterating the original poem (though a

sequence from Julien Temple's Pandaemo-

nium [2001] approaches this when it offers

an exquisite cinematic correlative for Col-

eridge's 'Frost at Midmght'); it is finding 1n its

own complex semiotic arsenal the means of

evoking what may have been at the heart of

the poet's inspiration. It's not just a matter of

somehow 'adapting' the poetry to the screen;

1t is also worth pondering how film might

convey the kind of passion or insight that has

produced the poetry. On recently watch1ng

several films that take a poet's life as their

starting point, whether a real or a fictional

poet, I'm struck by how little the films are

concerned with what makes a poet a poet, or

poetry poetry, preferring for the most part to

concentrate on the scribblers' eccentnc1ties

and sex lives. It's as if they'd taken to heart

those lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet,

Are of imagination all compact. (Act 5, 1 :7-8)

Most often films about poets have concentrat-

ed on their love lives. Take, for example, the

Metro Magaz1ne 164 • 111

CRITICAl ws

ridiculous Bad Lord Byron (David MacDon-

ald, 1948), or the even worse Total Eclipse

(Agnieszka Holland, 1995 (1998 1n Austral-

ia)), which gave Rimbaud such a doing-over.

Byron, I guess, IS a g1ft to filmmakers. even

if they don't seem to know what to do with

him. The 1948 Bntish film positions him as a

freedom fighter who dies in the struggle for

Greek independence, and IS subjected, as

he sleeps his last, to an imagined celestial

tnal 1n wh1ch various people testify as to

whether or not he is indeed 'the bad lord

Byron'. Witnesses include the women in h1s

life, most VIVidly Lady Caroline Lamb (Joan

Greenwood), who so famously described

h1m as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'

(she could talk!), and the late love of his life,

the Italian Countess Teresa Guiccioli (Mai

Zetterling). The latter leads him to compose

(and rec1te on screen), 'So I'll go no more

a-roving', as if this forged the link between

the life and the poetry. In the heavenly trial,

a SimplistiC dichotomy is set up between

the prosecution, dressed in dark robes and

photographed to match, and the defence, 1n

light dittos. It is impossible to accept a man-

nered Dennis Price as e1ther freedom fighter

or poet, and for all that the film is sprinkled

with lines such as 'There's no use treating

a poet like other men', there is almost no

sense of the poet's difference and separate-

ness. just a parade of tableaux in wh1ch he

struts about, an Inevitable recit1ng of 'She

walks in beauty ... ', and lines like 'And what

do you make of Chi/de Harold?' In fact, the

book written by producer Sydney Box at the

time of the film's making is more intelligent

and interesting than the resulting film.'

In Ken Russell's Goth1c (1986). Byron (Gabri-

el Byrne this time) is joined by Shelley (Julian

Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be, Mary (Nata-

sha Richardson), the author of Frankenstein.

In a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva, they

engage in a night of bizarre behaviours and

imaginings that are the forerunner to Mary's

seminal work. 'I eat merely to live; imagina-

tion is my sustenance,' declares Byron,

here depicted as a dangerous game-player

1: JOHN KEATS (BEN WHISHAW) AND FANNY BRAWNE (ABBIE CORNISH) IN BRIGHT STAR2: CHARLES BROWN (PAUL SCHNEIDER) AND KEATS 3: KEATS AND FANNY 4: FANNY AND HER SISTER 'TOOTS' (EDIE MARTIN 5: FANNY

112 • Metro Magaz1ne 164

whom Mary sees as a heartless seducer.

Meanwhile Shelley, like Byron 'bored with

life', is, as Mary mourns, ' too full of his own

tragedies to bear mine'. As with so much

of the Russell oeuvre, there is a flamboyant

daring about the film that scores as many

misses as hits, but occasionally it has a

kind of wild poetry of its own. Shelley at one

point observes that ' the rainwater catches

the moonlight like the trail of a slug'. The

line doesn't come from his published works

but does encapsulate a poet's capacity for

linking improbable phenomena to create a

new percept1on.

Though it may well be the case that on

film the pen is not mightier than the sword,

the little-seen Pandaemonium goes some

distance to showing filmically what the proc-

esses of poetic creation might be like. I've

ment1oned the magical moments in which

Coleridge (Linus Roache) seems to be find-

ing inspiration for his tenderly lovely 'Frost

at Midnight', and indeed this neglected film

deserves to be better known. At first glance,

the 'Lake Poets' may seem less promising

dramatic material than Byron and h1s mates,

but wait a minute ... There's Coleridge

hooked on laudanum, and the film's visual

gymnastics do capture something of the

disordered mind that gave the world 'Kubla

Khan' and 'The Rime of The Ancient Man-

ner'. and shows how Colendge somehow

maintained marriage to the down-to-earth

Sara (Samantha Morton). There is the revolu-

tionary fervour that gave way to something

more stolid in the case of Wordsworth (John

Hannah), not to speak of his incestuous

feelings for sister Dorothy (Emily Woof). The

contrast of the two authors of Lynca/ Bal-

lads (1798) makes for some real character

interest. even if the film is probably unfair to

Wordsworth. In Hannah's performance, he

has already become 'Daddy Wordsworth',

'thlck-ankled' as Matthew Arnold would later

describe him.

More than most films 'about' poets, Pan-

daemonium does make the poetry and its

creation a matter of central importance. For

instance, in the sequence 1n which Col-

eridge's imagination is gripped by the idea

of 'The Ancient Mariner', Temple shows real

visual fla1r in the accompanying images. The

two poets have observed an eel fisherman

at work, with his slimy quarries wriggling:

while Wordsworth offers a prosa1c account

of the eel-fishing industry (which no doubt

feeds 1nto h1s 'Resolution and Independ-

ence' where the fisherman has become a

leech-gatherer), Coleridge is fired by the

notion that 'slimy things did crawl with legs/

Upon the slimy sea'. The aural and the v1sual

work quite powerfully together in this long

episode in which the idea of the poet as

a man possessed IS rendered tn the film's

imagery and in the intensity of Roache's

performance. And it is not done w1th the

numbing literalness of trying to 'illustrate'

verse by means of audio-visual moving im-

ages. In a tonally different sequence, as if to

do just1ce to Wordsworth, Temple somehow

avoids the absurd when he presents Words-

worth composing 'Tintern Abbey' as he

walks on the hillside: 'I have IelVA presence

that disturbs me w1th the joy/Of elevated

thoughts'; 'The sound1ng cataract/Haunted

me like a passion ' and so on. The great thing

about Pandaemonium 1s that it persistently

foregrounds the poetry or what has 1nsp1red

it, how it gets made and sometimes how 11 1s

received, and it does so in terms that belong

to the cinema while doing justice to the

great works of the earlier medium.

Women and words

Of the many other films that have taken po-

ets as protagon1sts, most have been drawn

to those who led more or less tormented

lives. Take poor Sylvia Plath. Chnstlne Jeffs'

2003 b1opic Sylvia opens with her (Gwyneth

Paltrow) sleeping face in close-up and her

voice inton1ng on the soundtrack:

Sometimes I dream of a tree, and the tree

1s my life. One branch is the man I shall

marry, and the leaves my children. Another

branch is my future as a writer and each

leaf is a poem. Another branch is a glittering

academic career. But as I sit there trying to

choose, the leaves begm to turn brown and

blow away until the tree IS absolutely bare.

Her eyes are then open. but what we have

been g1ven is a poet's 1mag1ng of her life's

possibilities: we have been inducted into a

special way of apprehending the world and

her place in it. In this intelligent film there are

also 1mages of Plath typing away while the

words ('One day I'll have my death of him')

appear on screen and the perhaps inevitable

shots of typewriters in close-up. But this IS

as much the study of a marriage- Plath's

to poet Ted Hughes (Dan1el Cra1g) - as of a

poet. It is a marriage that bnngs as much

pain as pleasure, and maybe an element

of jealousy, not just of the other women

Hughes becomes involved with but also of

his greater renown. 'It must be wonderful to

be married to such a great poet,' someone

gushes, but Plath doesn't wan· to bathe 1n

his reflected glory. And he is sure his poetry

is more important than hers. V>.hen she

writes 'Lady Lazarus', AI Alvarez (Jared Har-

ris). prais1ng it, tells her that it IS 'expressed

with a coolness like a murderer's confes-

sion' Sylvia makes resonant use of a diction

that belongs to poets: 'I really feel that God

IS speaking through me,' Plath says in a mo-

ment of poetic exaltation.

Stevie (Robert Enders, 1978) is one of the

few other films about a woman poet I am

familiar with and it has not been available

for th1s study. The line I remember from the

film, based on Hugh Whitemore's play of the

same name, is poet Stevie Smith's reply to

a journalist (?) asking how such a woman

- reclusive, probably celibate -could have

written with such passion: 'I loved my aunt. '

She refers to her 'lion aunt of Hull' who

brought her up after her father had aban-

doned his family and her mother had died.

As delivered by Glenda Jackson as Stevie

(Mona Washbourne plays Aunt Madge) this

line had the ring of absolute emotional truth

and has stayed with me for thirty years. I

mention this film here because Stevie's reply

etched so vividly the idea of how an emo-

tion felt in one relationship might feed into

writing about others. These two films about

twentieth-century women poets give an

impressive sense of how their lives fed their

poetry. And significantly, Glenda Jackson

recalled her meeting w1th Stevie Smith when

the poet was reading her famous 'Not Wav-

Ing but Drowning':

The next day I rushed out and bought any

copies of her work I could find. I remem-

bered that meeting so distmctly and 1t

informed everything about doing the play

and then the film.'

This is perhaps less true of Sidney Franklin's

The Barretts of Wimpole Street, his 1956

British remake of the Hollywood film he had

d1rected 1n 1934, starring Norma Shearer as

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fredric March

as Robert Brown1ng and Charles Laughton

as father Barrett. These roles were taken 1n

the remake by a rather too-healthy-looking

Jennifer Jones, a strapp1ng Bill Travers and

a fiercely convincing John Gielgud. The film

begins with Jones's voice intoning on the

soundtrack Elizabeth's best-known poem,

'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

.. .' and ends with its last lines, ' ... I love

thee with the breath/Smiles, tears, of all my

life! ' Bookended between these quotings

is a robust melodrama of love triumphing

over paternal opposition (based in domestic

tyranny and possibly incestuous inclina-

tions) but not much sense of poets at work.

We have to take for granted that Elizabeth,

from her chaise longue, has become a m1nor

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CRITICAL lWS

celebrity, and when big Bill Travers comes

bounding into the Wimpole Street house we

learn that they have been in correspondence

and he has fallen in love with her through her

verse. As for his creative work, we get these

scraps: the well-known anecdote about how,

when he wrote 'Sordello'. 'Only God and

Robert Browning knew what I meant. Now,

God only knows'; Elizabeth's giggling cousin

Bella (Susan Stephen), on being introduced

to him goes into a recitation of 'Nobly, nobly

Cape St Vincent ... '; and Elizabeth herself

twice quotes the 'f1rst fine careless rapture'

b1t from 'Home-thoughts, from Abroad' .

Whatever the film's other merits, it can

hardly be taken seriously as a study of poets

going about their vocation.

Men at work

For contrasting views of two male poets at

work, I draw bnef attention to Total Eclipse

(the very title hints at what should have

been the film's destiny) and Gillies MacKin-

non's Regeneration (1997), derived from Pat

Barker's fine novel. Total Eclipse is about as

appalling and ridiculous a biopic - oh, any

film - as I can recall in recent times. Its main

narrative thrust is the famous gay love story

of drunken French poet Paul Verlaine and

provinc1al genius Arthur Rim baud. Rim-

baud (Leonardo DiCapno) writes to Verlaine

(David Thewlis), who unwisely invites him

to come and live wtth htm and his pregnant

wife in Paris. The opening caption about the

exchange of letters distmguishes between

merely be1ng 'a great poet' and being a

genius The film never begins to make one

believe that this pair of tedious charlies

could write anything that anyone else would

want to read. From Rimbaud's arrival at

Vertaine's Paris house, the film shows how it

plans to signify his genius. He belches, spits

and says to the ladies at first meeting, 'I

need a piss.' The screenplay is by Chris-

topher Hampton, who should have known

better than to allow Rimbaud to say of one

of hts poems: 'It means exactly what it

says. Word for word. No more no less.' or ' I

couldn't care less about publishing. It's only

the writing that matters.' or 'It was no longer

enough for me to be one person; I had to be

everyone. ' The film offers every cliche about

writers and clearly believes none of them.

Regeneration, which I suspect was never

released here, is very much worth seeking

out on DVD. It is also concerned with the

meeting of two poets: Siegfried Sassoon

114 • Metro Magaztne 164

(James Wilby) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart

Bunce), who both fetch up at Craiglockhart

War Hospital in Scotland 1n 1917, near the

end of the First World War. Psychiatrist Dr

William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) must assess

the sanity of Sassoon, who, though deco-

rated in the war, has made public, written

criticism of how the British military has

conducted the war; and Rivers IS also as-

signed the treatment of budding poet Owen,

as well as other disturbed soldiers. Inserts of

the mud and horror of the trenches reminds

us of Owen's dictum that 'the poetry is in the

pity', and the film makes intelligent use of

the actual poems. Sassoon's 'Base Details'

is heard in voice-over as Rivers reads 'the

quite good poem' Sassoon has left for him,

and it makes plain Sassoon's attitude to the

complacency of the home front. Sassoon

urges Owen to 'write something about the

war' and there is an ongoing sense of col-

laboration between the established poet and

the younger Owen. When the latter is writ-

Ing his requiem, 'Anthem for Dead Youth',

Sassoon suggests that 'Doomed' would be

more resonant than 'Dead', and in their next

sequence together the poem's title has been

changed and 'passing-bells' substituted for

'monstrous bells' in the opening line. I'm

aware of making this sound more banal than

it is in the context of the film. Regeneration

is fundamentally about the effects of war on

diverse men, but it also persuades one as

to how poets might influence and help each

other and make something true and valuable

out of ghastly life experiences.

Imaginary poets

Fictional poets are another matter. And thin

on the ground, perhaps not surprisingly,

when you think of the popular forms of

multiplex fodder. However, at least two have

appealed to big star names: Irvin Kershner's

A Fine Madness (1966) and Joseph Losey's

Boom! (1968). The latter can be dismissed

as of minimal interest here (and perhaps not

much anywhere else). In it Richard Burton

plays Chris Flanders, a poet with a reputa-

tion for preying on ageing rich women. one

of whom, shrewish beauty Flora Goforth,

prov1des a rote hand-Taylored for Eliza-

beth. We are told that Flanders was once

a fashionable poet, though not offered any

evidence of his creative work, and when he

starts to recite 'Kubla Khan' to Mrs Goforth

she snaps Impatiently, 'What?' He is now

known as the 'angel of death'. It is all very

portentous, very symbolic and very empty.

Samson Shillitoe, the iconoclastic poet figure

of A Fine Madness, is played with a certain

zest by Sean Connery, briefly released from

mid-sixties Bondage. Every now and then

he quotes from a well-known poem ('Has no

man ever told you "My love IS like a red, red

rose" or that he "loved your moments of glad

grace"? he asks the astonished meet1ng of

a ladles' club), but mostly we know he is a

poet only because he behaves so badly to

everyone, often drunk and usually insulting.

But it's not all cliche and the actors are good

enough to make one accept such formula-

tions about the poet's needs and sense of

his creative self as these: 'When the poem

is go1ng nght he's in another world', his w1fe

(Joanne Woodward) explains; and he tells a

psychiatrist, 'You protect what is, I envis-

age what might be. ' It's not a profound film

but it is not foolish either. And the Monthly

Film Bulletin was right to suggest that even

if it 'doesn't ultimately come off ... at least

it makes a valiant attempt to present a poet

who works at his job'3 - and that is one of

the persistent strengths of the best of the

films under discussion.

Other films with fictional poets 1nctude Neil

LaBute's Possession (2002), adapted from

A.S. Byatt's novel in which present-day

academics investigate the affairs of a Victo-

rian poet, convincingly enough incarnated by

Jeremy Northam, and Anthony Asquith's The

Final Test (1953), which has some simplistic

notions of poets as young men who forget

the time when in the gnp of inspiration. This

particular young man (Ray Jackson) tells hts

test-cricketer dad (Jack Warner) that 'When

you're writing you get so worked up, it's like

being drunk'. The object of his veneration is

a rude and portly cliche of a poet caricatured

in Terence Rattigan's screenplay and Robert

Morley's performance. Cliches are what we

are apt to get in the screen's representation

of poets and their work; they are, happily,

not what we get in Jane Campion's Bright

Star.

Something like it: Bright Star

It was viewing Bright Star that led me to re-

flect on the way poets' lives and work have

been represented on screen. Now, it can be

said that Campion has also concentrated

on Keats' love for Fanny Brawne, the 'bnght

star' of the title, but the result is neither

ridiculous nor vulgar.

The poet emerges firmly as the man in love

in Bright Star, and Fanny herself shares the

film's attention, not just as the object of

Keats's love but as a dressmaker who can

support herself by her work. The film actu-

ally opens on the image of a needle piercing

cloth, and, ignorant as I am about such

matters, I felt that all Fanny's costumes have

the look of skilfully home-made clothes. She

prepares herself for her meet1ng with Keats,

vis1t1ng a bookseller who is cross at having

taken twenty cop1es of 'Endymion' that

he is finding hard to sell (her young sister

volunteers the remark 'Fanny wants to see

if he's an idiot or not'), and is later heard

reading aloud its famous open1ng line, 'A

thing of beauty is a JOY forever/Its loveliness

Increases'.

It is Fanny who makes the runmng in their

relationship, quoting 'Endymion' to him

when she approaches him at a dance, where

he seems to be a mere looker-on at the

gaieties. She questions his association with

the clumsy Charles Brown (Pau Schneider),

who will come to look upon Keats' Interest in

Fanny as a distraction from his true voca-

tion. But this IS not a densely potted film;

neither Is it a solid costume romance in the

traditions of either Hollywood or BBC TV. If

anyth1ng, it feels more like a continental film,

prepared to let the central relat onship daw-

dle, w1thout losing a certain sexual tension,

and to let the sense of Keats as a writer

emerge. The film not only quotes some of

the most recognisable lines bu also man-

ages to subsume these into its unobtrusive

narrative habits.

The overarching narrative facts are Keats'

and Fanny's growing affection, the shadow

of h1s persistent ill-health and our knowledge

of his early death (and the con rast of Ben

Whishaw's pallor and Abbie Cornish's look

of rude health is important to the drama).

But these do not make for a gloomy film:

Keats is seen as quietly playfu when he

quotes his sonnet, 'When I have fears ... ' at

the Brawnes' dinner table, where they have

been left alone and h1s hand reaches for

hers. When he gets to the line about 'Huge

cloudy symbols of a high romance', I was

reminded of that other great film about un-

consummated love, Brief Encounter (David

Lean, 1945), in which the unromantic hus-

phrase quoted in the film from Keats' letters

where he writes that he is 'sure of nothing

but the holiness of the heart's affections'.

The love scenes are done with tenderness

and tact, and are not any less persuasive for

the fact that the lovers remain fully clad.

And what about the poet as distinct from the

lover? The tone in which 'When I have fears

... ' is introduced into the film is symptomatic

of Bright Star's discretion and balance: the

poem, with its intimations of mortality, works

on our knowledge of Keats' early death but

the cheerful domestic setting in which he

speaks it seems to insist that we value the

life and perception that has produced the

sonnet. Christopher Ricks, 1n a patronis-

ing and misguided piece In The New York

Review of Books, claims - nay, asserts- that

'there can never be a substitute for such

imagination as offers so much to the mind's

eye'": he doesn't begin to take account of

how a film sequence through its placement

in the over-all narrative trajectory, as well

as in the details of its mise en scene, might

offer the viewer a new aspect of the poem.

It is not worth belabouring Ricks because,

gifted though he 1s as a literary critic, he

clearly is less well-placed to JUdge effects

achieved cinematically.

What the film does achieve is a sense of

what it may be like to be a poet, as well as

a (doomed) lover. As In the sequences in

Regeneration in which Sassoon and Owen

work on 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' , there

are images of the poet actually working on

a poem, urged on sometimes by his friend

Brown. For all that Keats claimed that if po-

etry 'comes not as the leaves on the tree It

were best it not come at all', he also clearly

worked at his art. There is a juxtaposition

of shots in which Campion cuts from Fanny

at her sewing to Keats' thinking aloud, 'My

heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains

my sense .. .' : that is, a point is simply and

potently made about two kinds of work. In

my view, the film makes properly prolix an

imaginative use of both the poetry and the

letters. Why, after all, might a poet in love

not recite a new poem to the object of his

affections, as Keats does with 'La belle

dame sans merci', and why might not she

take up the lines with 'I love thee true'? The

band 1s doing a crossword that asks him to poem, that is, is being built into the film's

complete the line and his wife answers, 'Ro- narrative texture. As Sophie Gee has said,

mance.' The romance of Bright Star Is not a 'Campion stages it as a semi-consummation

depressing affair, despite the acts: instead, scene? and Fincina Hopgood rightly claims

it seems more like a muted celebration of a (though she is not speaking particularly of

this moment) that 'The actors deliver Keats'

lines without self-consciousness and effort,

allowing the words to speak the emotions•.a

There's a great deal more I'd like to say

about this often exqwsite film that articulates

its idea of poetry very appropriately through

the visual, as In a beautiful wintry scene on

Hampstead Heath. The casting of Australian

Abbie Cornish as Fanny and Ben Whishaw

as Keats seems to me absolutely spot-on:

physically they incarnate perfectly the robust

bloom of Fanny and the sallow, shadowed

look of Keats, and between them, visually as

well as in the psychological shadings they

bring to their roles, seem as nearly perfect

as makes no matter. This IS a film about a

great artist and an impress1ve woman: they

complement and enhance each other.

'We cannot do without interpretations', says

Ricks, while being unwill1ng to adm1t that

film might offer a reading not just of lines but

of lives- as I believe Bright Star does. Films

about poets can, at the1r best, provide us

with another set of images to complement,

contradict or enrich those we have already

imbibed from our reading. Keats Is famously

a poet of the senses; Campion, In th1s film

and in her medium, seduces us aurally and

visually, and makes us think again about the

famous poet in the context of his life and

work.

Endnotes

' Sydney Box & Vivien Cox, The Bad Lord

Byron, Convoy Publications, London,

1949. 2 'Glenda Jackson', in Brian McFarlane,

An Autobiography of British Cmema,

Methuen/ BFI, London, 1997, p.317. 3 T.M., Monthly Film Bulletin, September

1966, p.137.

• Christopher Ricks, 'Undermining Keats',

The New York Review of Books, 17

December, 2009, p.49. 5 'Bright Stars: Sophie Gee on John

Keats and Fanny Brawne Revisited', The

Monthly, December 2009-January 2010,

p.59.

a Fincina Hopgood, 'Lighting the Lamp:

Jane Campion's Bright Star, Metro, no.

163, 2009, p .14.

Metro Magaz1ne 164 • 115