Raves for Bright Star

A. O. Scott of the NY Times is rapturous about Jane Campion's new film Bright Star, the love story of the poet Keats and Fanny Brawne. He expecially lavishes praise on Abbie Cornish, who plays Fanny:

The movie really belongs to Brawne, played with mesmerizing vitality and heart-stopping grace by Abbie Cornish.

Ms. Cornish, an Australian actress whose previous films include “Stop-Loss,” “Candy” and “Somersault,” has, at 27, achieved a mixture of unguardedness and self-control matched by few actresses of any age or nationality. She’s as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be.

The film is very romantic, but their love was never consumated:

That Fanny and Keats must sublimate their longings in letters, poems and conversations seems cruel, but they make the best of it. As does Ms. Campion: a sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.

Watch this scene as they are separated by a wall, and yet communicate their love:

Can't wait!

Jane Campion's Bright Star

Jane Campion's Bright Star created quite a stir at it's premiere at Cannes. This is one for awards season, and it's so great to have a new romance by director Jane Campion to look forward to.

One of the highlights of the weekend at the Cannes Film Festival was the premiere of Jane Campion’s Bright Star, centering on the 3-year romance, from 1818-1821, between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Ben Whishaw stars as Keats, Abbie Cornish as his paramour Fanny, and Thomas Sangster as her brother Samuel.

Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 stedfast, 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.

--- John Keats