Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)

Like any biopic, or a literary or artistic biography in any medium, Jane Campion’s Bright Star (which depicts the late life of John Keats until his death in 1821, his love affair with Fanny Brawne and her rivalry with Charles Brown, Keats’s close friend, for the poet’s heart and attention) finds itself having to ask a question: where do literary works come from? What was going on when a writer, musician or painter came up with a work of art now familiar to us? And in answering that question, the biographer confronts another problem: do they find their explanations in the everyday life of the poet, in his or her erotic and personal encounters, and so on, thereby risking an occasionally reductive determinism (which accounts for an art-work as the direct and explicit consequence of a particular profession, a particular moment, a particular glimpse of the beloved, and so on), or suggest that the life of their subject is lived every bit as passionately as their art, and thereby slip into fancy and expressionism, obscuring the often laborious processes by which life is turned into art?

The very best biographies have to confront this problem; the solution that Bright Star finds begins with the first shot of the film: a close-up of Brawne’s needlework, a needle passing through cloth. This is an occupation that is portrayed throughout the film, and Campion makes us see an analogy between the two creative professions – Brawne’s needlework and Keats’s poetry. The analogy is complicated by Keats’s insistence that poetry (perhaps unlike Brawne’s more obviously laborious craft) needs to come from feeling or from nowhere at all, but it also calls that claim into question, especially as the scene in which Keats is shown composing ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a reverie beneath a tree in his garden is followed by a scene of him and Brown poring over the text of the poem – editing it, putting it into shape. Poems are produced as much by work, the film insists, as by inspiration. In fact, the many scenes showing Keats and Brown in their “poets’ room” both pay tribute to that fact, and satirize the alternative claim made by mere inspiration: for while the film claims that Keats’s best creativity comes from having Brawne near to him, it also debunks the notion that poetry can come from nowhere, from the mere heady atmosphere of reverie.

In other words, Bright Star switches our attention from the creative moment to the products of artistic inspiration and work – books of poetry, written texts. And these written artefacts (poems, letters, books) are treated with reverence, both by their recipients and by the camera, which frames and dwells on them as they are passed from hand to hand, pressed against windows, and so on. This is only true, though, insofar as the same is so of Brawne’s dresses, ribbons, pillowslips. Erotic reverence for these art-works (literary or stitched) is the emotional and cinematographic touchstone of the film, and it is produced at the moments when they are passed from person to person, shared, spoken together or by characters in turn.

Once again, Campion stages a parodic version of this, as Brown delivers rhymes upon a scone to the Irish maid whom he is about to seduce – but at its most reverential, it is a trope that appears again and again (for instance, the pin-prick drawing of a fairy princess made by Brawne next to the bed slept in by Keats: we don’t see the figure, but we see her asking him about it). At moments, it might seem to complicate the politics of the film, and of Keats’s verse. To have the lovers recite alternate stanzas of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, with its queasy anxiety about the power of mysterious women to suck the life away from unwary men, might seem to diminish or overlook these uncomfortable, or at least ambiguous aspects. But since Campion incorporates this recital into the moment when Keats is bracing himself for his departure from Brawne, a scene in which love, blame and sickness seem to come together, the poem seems to bear the weight of declaration and accusation combined.

Bright Star works, in other words, because it shifts the focus of the film slightly away from Keats, and balances him with Brawne; it shifts its narrative focus away from creative inspiration, onto the poems themselves, as shared by the two lovers – not as metaphors of their love, or as contrived commentary upon it, but as something shared and read together. Fanny Brawne is an essential part of Bright Star, not just because Abbie Cornish’s portrayal is so good, so controlled until her final seizures of grief, but because she allows Campion to reconceive the shape of cinematic biography.

Back to Bond

What does everyone know about James Bond, as played by Daniel Craig? He has 'breathed new life into the character', or however you want to put it, he has given us our thrills and spills back, he has inspired lust and man-lust and a thousand diets and work-outs. And he has identified something unpleasant, thuggish, in the franchise and in the character. I'm not sure how much further he can take this charmless brutalism, or whether, to be honest, I'm really up for any more Bond.

But what I hadn't realised about his films was the way in which they would make me see earlier Bond incarnations with fresh eyes. Not by providing a new model for them, a new standard of technical or athletic excellence against which Sean and Roger and so on would look pale and jowly, but somehow by releasing something nasty in those old films that had been there all along. It was only last night, we were tired and wanted something to watch before going to bed, we put on the video of You Only Live Twice, ready for some good honest fun and jokes about chest-hair and men coming first in Japan - and couldn't believe what we were seeing. All of the charm had gone. We could only see the casual, patronizing misogyny; the glamour of location (all that glamour!) had disappeared and only the racial stereotypes remained. Those things must have been there while we were watching these movies in the past: why did we not see them head on? Why did it take a re-casting of that original to show us what the original was really like?

I still stand by the narratives of these early films. I still think they bring together discovery and adventure in an exciting way. I still think that a Bond who can discover everything from his laptop is not just a 'Bond for the modern age' but a man who no longer has to struggle to find anything out (and what is an adventure story, an adventure narrative, if discovery - discovery of the story - has no danger?). But I don't know whether I'll be watching them again in a hurry.

You've been a long way away

It's been a long time since I was here. I've moved house, changed jobs, and made a solemn resolution to make a go of this. I've seen a lot of films since last time; saw my first Chabrol movies over the holidays, loved Le Boucher, loved La Ceremonie. And I watched There Will be Blood and enjoyed it much more than I thought I might. We also watched Pan's Labyrinth over the weekend, and again had a much better time than we might have done. But I'm going to start by writing about a film that we saw last night, The Wrestler. More anon.