Cannes Hugh Dig It?

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The title of Jane Campion’s latest film is taken from what some thought to be Keats’ last sonnet (though there’s disagreements about that). Midway through the film, Fanny Brawne, the heroine of this film wonders aloud if the poet is referring to her as the one who is in-constant and changeable. This question of “constancy” – what we twenty-first centurists might call “focus” or “stick-to-it-iveness” – is at the heart of Bright Star.

Charles Brown, the third player in this ménage-a-crois (and note the echo of ‘Brawne’), is never as constant as Keats – neither in love nor poetry.

As much as this film is about Fanny’s constancy, these two men also represent what might be called the “ideal” romantic male and the “actual” (all-too-human) male that women idolize/idealize – then often settle for. Because Keats is so elusive as a romantic presence for Fanny, you are left wondering whether she is indeed deluding herself or if she, like Keats, has taken the highest road.

As visual treat, this may be one of the most beautiful and cinematic (if by cinematic we mean worthy of a whole freaking movie theater, not just a tv screen) films I’ve seen in a while. Whether it is a room filled with butterflies or a spring morning in a field of lilacs, the scenes are composed with a painter’s care. One scene, a third of the way through, seems to be lifted directly from a Vermeer painting.

Which brings me to the experience of the Lumiere theater… Any theater named after the two brothers who helped invent cinema ought to be great, but not having seen an Edison theater in the States, I’m not quite sure what to compare this huge, cavernous space where the curtains are slowly drawn back with a cautious care that is breathtaking as you wait for light to fill the entire wall.

Although I was up in the upper balcony, I was immersed in the film by the cinematography, the acting and the space itself….

In the end, I want to see Bright Star again; in part to see if my disappointment is because I expected something more out of a John Keats’ movie – or if Campion has achieved something astonishing in this twittered, IM’d Age – a quiet, and Romantic (with a capital “R”) film that takes it time in revealing itself as a poem.