In "Bright Star," a dramatization of the intense though unconsummated love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne, the filmmaker Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (apart from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress). Yet the effect is exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable. It's like the dive into a lake that Keats evokes to explain the experience of poetry. The point, he explains to Fanny, is not to get to the other side, but to luxuriate in the lake.
The most obvious source of pleasure is the film's heroine, about whom much has been written in the past two centuries, despite a scarcity of factual knowledge. What's never been in doubt is the depth of the poet's passion for Fanny; his love letters to her enjoy a special place in English literature. What we know about her, though, comes mainly from him, and it's more suggestive than definitive. His first impression, that of a stylish minx, gave way to adoration for a woman who, he said, could "concentrate my whole senses." Not a blank slate, then, but one with plenty of open spaces that Ms. Campion has filled in the course of a film that avoids any trace of musty reverence for a long-dead poet by concentrating our senses on the breathtaking girl next door.
In an earlier time this protofeminist creation might have been played by Katharine Hepburn. Happily for us she's played by Abbie Cornish, the Australian actress who, as I said in my Telluride preview last week, is as luminous as the star of the lyric poem, written by Keats for Fanny, that gives the film its title. Ms. Cornish's beauty is very much a part of the attraction, since her character is a shameless, vivacious flirt. (Watch her upstage a bedroom full of butterflies.) （英语影评）But so is her quick intelligence and her ease with heightened language, for this version of Fanny Brawne is something of an artist in her own right—a fashion designer before the term was coined—and something of an intellectual, albeit undeclared, even to herself.
If Fanny can't fathom the depths of Keats's writing at first—"Poems," she declares, "are a strain to work out"—she is eager and abundantly able to learn. If she can't understand his sexual reticence—to which he alludes, with welcome brevity, by saying "I'm not sure I have the right feelings toward women"—she loves him for the ardent and anguished man he is, as well as for his still-controversial literary gifts.
This is not, after all, the immortal Keats studied in books, but John Keats, an impoverished and all-too-mortal writer who has contracted tuberculosis and is soon to die at the age of 25. He's played by Ben Whishaw, who, in his own artful, tactful way, matches Abbie Cornish's vivacity with a delicacy that conceals a soaring spirit. "There's a holiness to the heart's affection," Keats says angrily to his Scottish friend Charles Brown, who has mocked Fanny by sending her a flirtatious valentine. The line is a tricky one, its pitfall being sanctimoniousness, but Mr. Whishaw delivers it with an understated urgency that colors every moment of his beautiful performance.
Tact isn't Charles Brown's style. Thanks to an inspired stroke of casting, he's portrayed by the American actor Paul Schneider, who makes him an enormously entertaining boor, not to mention a hostile, supercilious clown dedicated to dominating Keats's life in the name of protecting him from such distractions as Fanny's love. In a film distinguished by—though never encumbered by—exquisite taste, Mr. Schneider's raunchy rambunctiousness is a tonic.
