The normal Oscar-season treatment of this subject would be to spotlight the great poet’s struggles with his art and his muse: thunder on the soundtrack and Fanny sitting in the back of the bus. Campion does something shocking, even subversive: She makes Brawne the subject and Keats the limpid love object. Fanny’s emotional journey becomes the focus; the poems mostly shimmer in the background haze. At the same time, “Bright Star’’ is so far from the pejorative term “chick flick’’ as to make your head spin. This is a woman’s film in the deepest ways possible.
That extends to the pace, which is hushed and intimate; some will mistake it for dull. The film at first seems the opposite of drama, as Fanny and Keats almost casually come into contact in their rural corner of England. He is staying with his friend and backer Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), she’s a tart-tongued woman of modest means and practical outlook. If you think that Fanny is a Jane Austen heroine, so, in a sense, does Fanny. The movie’s explicitly about how the age of Austen was vanquished by the Romantic era of Keats, Byron, and Shelley - how sense tumbled helplessly and willingly into sensibility.
Fanny’s attempts at intelligent banter thus fall flat because, simply, Keats doesn’t play that. She’s still drawn to his gentleness and to the sensitivity that makes him quiver like an antenna in a top hat. By the time the two share a kiss by a sleepy riverside, the planet itself seems to wobble on its axis. Some may be disappointed that “Bright Star’’ is lacking in the transgressive kink of “The Piano’’ and other Campion films, but the emotions here are no less galvanic and no less profound for the characters keeping their clothes on.
