A Bright Star
DIRECTOR: Jane Campion
CAST: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Thomas Sangster, Paul Schneider, Samuel Barnett, Kerry Fox , Edie Martin , Claudie Blakley , Gerard Monaco , Antonia Campbell-Hughes
CLASSIFICATION: PG
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
London, 1818 – a secret love affair begins between 23-year-old English poet John Keats and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of fashion. This unlikely pair started at odds; he thinking her a stylish minx, she unimpressed by literature in general. But when Keats's younger brother falls ill John and Fanny are drawn together. Keats, touched by Fanny's efforts to help care for his brother, agrees to teach her poetry.
By the time Fanny's alarmed mother (Kerry Fox) and Keats's best friend Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider) realize their attachment, the relationship had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept into powerful new sensations: "I have the feeling as if I were dissolving," Keats wrote to her. Together they rode a wave of romantic obsession that deepened as their troubles mounted. Only Keats's own fatal illness proved insurmountable.
"What Campion does is seek visual beauty to match Keats' verbal beauty. There is a shot here of Fanny in a meadow of blue flowers that is so enthralling it beggars description."- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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