The Telegraph have posted a short review on Bright Star.
Jane Campion’s heartbreaking film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, the subject of his Bright Star sonnet, is a remarkable achievement. It’s an awkwardly lifelike, lyrical, intense, sincere engagement with one of the great poets (played by Ben Whishaw) through his relationship with a girl who learned to appreciate poetry through him.
What’s so successful about the film is its focus on the vain, flirtatious, then passionately committed Fanny, played by the Australian actress Abbie Cornish; and its recreation of her world, Hampstead circa 1820.
The film has been criticised, fairly, for not trusting Keats’s words enough – for example, giving us a noisy nightingale when Keats is writing his ode to it. What lifts us over such minor misjudgments is the tale of reciprocal obsession and loss, which Campion makes so involving.
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