The film was obviously still going on, Whishaw was doing perhaps his finest piece of screen acting to date and the fact that it was a voice over did not mean it was less important. I, for one, would have loved to hear all of his cristalline rendition of Keats' poem.
But if you happen to watch it with a better-mannered audience, nothing can mar the beauty of this film. Beauty is not an adjective used lightly or for lack of a wider vocabulary with reference to Bright Star: each sequence, each scene, each frame of this ode to love is a perfect composition of light, colour and sound that I can recall only seeing in Visconti or in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.
Perhaps this beauty - of summer and autumn in the Kentish landscape, of the naturally lit interiors (by a fireplace, candles, or the natural daylight pouring through an open kitchen's door) - is at times too much, too artistically distracting from the main narrative.
And yet, it works, because this is a film about the fleeting happiness and quiet torment of young love, its heightened emotions and the world perceived through the eyes of different kinds of artists (one of them a genius) for whom love is both very real and transcendent: a key to the beauty of the universe around them.
Fanny Brawne, the object of Keats' love (and of his adoring critics' vilification for many years to come), is also an artist. Campion dedicates many scenes to her embroidery and stitching, showing the equivalence between John and his friends' work and her own. She proudly claims that her sewing is of equal value to their writing and that, unlike what they do, "it makes money," too. It certainly creates beauty and illustrates her sentiments to those she loves and who love her.
She wears her fashionable, self-designed laces and trims without shame, shrugging off accusations of being "flirty," and when the time of mourning comes she replaces the bright colour palette of pinks and whites and purples, with a black one that expresses her grief: all her own creation.
The story is a simple and well-known one, banal even, if it wasn't for Keats' poems and letters that have immortalised it: two young people fall in love and feel and hope and are a little tormented in the way that all young lovers are.
Keats' poverty and then his illness, all the obstacles that are thrown in Fanny and John's way are incidental, because Campion's focus is mainly on the nature of love, attempting as she does to grasp the origin and growth of this most exquisite of feelings: why it makes us climb up trees, fill our room with butterflies, write verses or do cross-stitching, adore our little sister just a little bit more.
Or how it makes us want to stop breathing once and for all when it leaves us.
The acting of the entire cast is wonderful, but of course the film belongs to Ben Whishaw, who is simply perfect as the young, fragile Keats (I utterly disliked his performance as Sebastian Flyte in Andrew Davies' Brideshead Revisited: I thought it was misguided - clearly by the director - and manneristic; I am glad that his considerable talent has found a perfect match in Campion). And it belongs even more to Abbie Cornish, who portrays Fanny as a self-possessed young woman, aware of her desires and of her worth, undaunted by how others try to define her.
I was glad to find out that while Fanny cherished the memory of her love for Keats forever (wearing his lock of hair close to her heart for the rest of her life), she also lived and loved again.
