In a screenwriting class I took lo these many years ago, the importance of a film’s opening image was brought up. The instructor was male, most of the class was male, and the example he used was male iconography: “A gun in your face.” It was from a Clint Eastwood movie, one of those interchangeable Dirty Harry movies. An opening image, intoned the teacher, should immediately establish the themes and concerns of the movie. I’d have thought the words “Clint Eastwood” and “Dirty Harry” would suffice, but apparently, “a gun in your face” drives it home.

The opening image of Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” about the love between John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, is an extreme close-up of a needle piercing a cloth, a close image, very close, so close that you can see the fibers of the cloth furring its surface. This, then, will be a film about intimacy and domesticity, about creativity and limitations. We see half of just one stitch, after all, not a dramatic sweep of a draped skirt, so we know we are in different territory than a typical costume drama, or “frock flick.”

“My stitching has more merit and admirers than both of your two scribblings put together,” Fanny tells John Keats and Charles Brown, as they rudely shoo her from the room so they can work on their poetry. “And I can make money from it.”

That one small scene encapsulates all the conflicting forces of the film: her utilitarian talent and his ethereal one, a woman’s “craft” versus a man’s “high art,” the rivalry among the poets Keats and Brown and the interloper Fanny; the lovers Fanny and Keats and the jealous, carping Brown, who yearns for fulfillment from poetry, Fanny, and Keats all and finds it in none, and all three of them against the fate of fortune. None of them has one.

The nip of poverty is a real wolf at the door in this film: if Keats were to marry Fanny, he would have to get a job and give up his poetry, if he were to marry Fanny as a poet, her family, already scraping by to maintain a respectable bourgeois façade, would have to support him. So instead of making love they yearn and make do. “Making do” is another theme of the film – not only does Fanny design and sew all of her own clothes, but nearly every character in the film is seen creating something, whether something as basic as a meal or as elaborate as an orchestra composed solely of human voices.

Not for the action junkie or even the impatient, “Bright Star” is an exquisite film. Characters leave a kitchen worthy of Vermeer to step into a meadow worthy of Renoir, and all this visual splendor is accompanied by a blessedly muted soundtrack. We don’t need a swell of string section to emphasize that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Jane Campion has always been a filmmaker sure of her own eye; it’s nice to know she has faith in ours as well.

Labels: Bright Star, Jane Campion, poetry

posted by Elizabeth at 10:46 AM