A growing-up godBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art . . .
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
One of my growing-up gods was John Keats. The romantic poet of Ode to a Nightingale and Eve of St. Agnes, among many first-rate compositions, is defined by director Jane Campion in Bright Star just as he might have been: frail, delicate, handsome, and sensitive. The imagery in the above excerpt from the titular poem is characteristic: Nature-bound, ethereal, longing, and deathly.
Keats' love for Fanny Brawne is the poetry of this film, a tortured romance never consummated and filled with longing, as appropriate for a young Nature poet whose very breath exudes ultra sensibility. Filmed in sumptuous color with costumes equally so (Fanny was a gifted seamstress/designer), Bright Star is Masterpiece Theater stuffy and lyrical--stuffy because it has the Brit reserve that keeps us from wholly entering the characters' minds and lyrical, well, it is Keats' poetry after all. The interspersing of his poetry in dialogue and voice over is as beautiful as should be in his biography, leaving a sense of the immortal among the living: "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness . . ." (Ode on a Grecian Urn).
His best friend, Mr. Brown (Paul Schneider), who boards with Keats and helps with the poetry, serves as a fitting metaphor for the wall an artist must erect to keep out the world while he translates to paper the inspiration that must come from the gods. After all, just these words from Endymion would immortalize the least of us: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever . . . ." Schneider does a masterful job of balance between his obsession with Keats and his recognition that he will have to share the poet with the world.
John Keats' death at 25 of tuberculosis was one of the saddest moments in the history of letters. Jane Campion moves to this tragedy with dignity in a bright film that begs for more as did Keats' life.
"I have been half in love with easeful Death . . . ." Ode to a Nightingale
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com