Bright Star (2009)

Jane Campion has made a bunch of interesting movies. One of them, An Angel at my Table, about the author Janet Frame, is one of the best biographical films I have seen. On the paper, Bright Star sounds quite awful: the story revolves around John Keats, a poor and rather self-involved poet living for his art and a young girl, an independent-spirited dress-maker, who is his neighbor. They have mixed feelings for each other but gradually fall in love (despite Keat's jealous buddy who wants the poet all for himself), but it is not possible for them to marry. The poet, turns out, is ill. The film hints at a familiar figure of thinking: romantic love as most noble when it is - as the expression goes - never consummated (I recently read a philosopher who held this idea to be an important theme in 18th novels). If you expect all Campion's films to be about sex - this one is an exception. But the awfulness I expected never quite materialized. Campion is a far too curious director. What is perhaps most successful is how art occupies many roles. It's an enchantment, an obsession, it has its great risks, a sort of self-indulgence, where life itself becomes art. But in the end, Campion ends up confirming the image of ennobling romance, where romance transcends mere human desire by ending up in martyrdom. Well - it's interesting how Campion takes on the task of exploring this not very contemporary ideal, but I have no idea what the film wants us to think. It's never quite clear to me what destroys these people's love: an external obstacle or ideals and fears? Or is this more a film about transience and mortality? Is it a film about self-deception or a film about doomed love and what does "doomed love" even mean?The style of the film gives little cues. Campion embellishes the material with a calm, (mostly) restrained yet expressive cinematography (in slow, wistful takes, the colors and scenes of country and semi-urban life are evoked - and no obtrusive music is used to make us feel anything very particular) and she never looks for the sort of explosive scenes that are so common in movies about love. What saves the film is Campion's debunking of the myth of the Artist whose creativity and singular vision makes human relations secondary or even impossible. Campion takes a deep look into this image, disentangling it into several different human forms of temptations and yearnings. Campion seems to take more than a cursory interest in what kinds of conventional ideals about love the two main protagonists give expression to. The characters are often melodramatic but the film places itself at a distance, quizzically gazing at this form of life in which romantic poetry of the early 19th century was immersed.