Strange-eyed constellations

‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,’ opined Keats at the opening of Endymion. On the evidence of Jane Campion’s ‘Bright Star’, this was a precept, along with venturing into the dank cold without an overcoat, about which Keats was unquestionably wrong. Campion’s film is beautiful. As Deborah Ross puts it, ‘Campion’s eye for detail and nature and light is fantastic’. But, the joy of this vision lasts barely an hour, let alone the eternity of the full 120 minutes.

This film of the chaste romance between Keats and Fanny Brawne is more black hole than bright star. The gravity of its boredom pulls the viewer’s soul, appreciation of love and, at times, consciousness into its narcoleptic plot. Campion cannot be blamed entirely. She adapts a love story, both as a fact and as a metaphor for Keats’ poetry, which is at its raciest when the swooning lovers share a ‘tender embrace’ on a clapped-out daybed. Then, the penniless poet ventures to London without a coat, contracts TB and dies, only very slowly and without doing a great deal in the interim.

Keats may or not be the greater poet, but Byron, damn it even the sepulchral Wordsworth, lived more interesting lives. With a realisation that confirms I might not be in the wrong profession after all, ‘Bright Star’ proves that not all writers are, by definition, interesting people.