Bright Star at Thame Cinema this Saturday 12/06/10
THAME CINEMA 4 ALL presents Bright Star UK/ USA 2009, 119 minutes, PG certificate – Directed by Jane Campion, Starring Ben Wishaw, Abbie Cornish, Kerry Armstrong, John Schneider.
JANE Campion makes a welcome return to the cinema with this heartbreakingly beautiful love story – one of the great love stories of English literature that remained a secret until years after both its protagonists were dead. It tells the story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne, the woman who never quite became his wife thanks to his untimely death in Rome from tuberculosis in 1821.
Fanny and Keats frequent the same Hampstead literary circles and become neighbours: playful banter and mutual suspicion lead to friendship that soon develops into ardent affection. Unable to marry her thanks to his lack of income or position, their frustrated love is destined to express itself in an intense and passionate correspondence, and in a shared love of poetry. Their relationship is also the subject of suspicion – the gossip of their local community, and the solicitous jealousy of Keats’ writer companion Charles Brown, who fears the consequences for Keats’ poetry of his attachment to Fanny.
Campion’s feminism – more explicit in her best known film, The Piano – is still very much in evidence in this movie, albeit less strident. Fanny is imprisoned by society and convention, even in a relatively bohemian social milieu, and Campion beautifully depicts the circumscribed life of an early 19th century woman, confined to feminine rituals that feel frustrating and suffocating: the domestic interior, the fastidious needlework – beautifully realised in close ups of needle and thread and linen – her clothing and corsetry and household duties. The love affair, in contrast, offers the potential for liberation and self expression: it is conducted largely out of doors in woodland and meadow, where she is allowed to move and breathe. A truly lovely and swooningly romantic film of doomed love and beautiful verse.
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This Saturday 12th June 2010 – Doors open 7.30pm Film 8pm. Admission
