Rent Bright Star (2009)

A bittersweet poetic love story - Bright Star review by EP

This film is a period drama about John Keats who is a famous English poet. It mainly revolves around his latter creative period, love with a beautiful girl and his rather irritating best friend.

It is beautifully made and there is just enough high brow poetic creativity without it being self important or overly clever.

The final part of the film is about Keats' illness and gut wrenching love enduring separation.

Overall it is an interesting film about poetry, love and death, it is not perhaps always the most uplifting film to watch and rather sad particularly in the final parts but it is satisfying and has much more depth than the usual American rom-coms myself and my wife usually go for.

It is also interesting to hear the poetry itself as I am rather a philistine when it comes to poetry and I had not heard much of Keats before. His poetry is ethereal and swirly to listen to, it is not so much to be understood I feel, but to be heard and swept up in.

Admiring the Wallpaper - Bright Star review by griggs

Expected to be swept off my feet by a Campion period romance; mostly I admired the wallpaper. To be fair, it’s some wallpaper — bluebell fields, light through curtains, Fanny lying in a room full of butterflies. Shots you’d happily frame.

The costumes earn their keep too. Fanny styles herself as a walking statement (her triple-pleated mushroom collar even gets a line of dialogue), and Ben Whishaw is well cast as Keats — hollow-eyed, consumptive, a man a stiff breeze could finish off. Paul Schneider’s Mr Brown, prickly and permanently in the way, is weirdly the most alive person in it.

The trouble is the romance is all longing and no heat. Two hours of yearning through walls needs more undertow than this, and my attention wandered around the hour mark. Abbie Cornish’s grief at the end landed; the rest I watched from a polite distance.

Lovely to look at, hard to love.

Interesting biopic of Keats short tragic life - Bright Star review by Peter B

Time when, in UK, one in three people had TB and many young people died of it. More tragic when people, like Chopin and Keats, were so talented. Staggeringly, in the rest of the world 1 in 3 people are still infected with it, mainly in poor countries. The WHO is trying to eradicate it world-wide. Good acting, sad little tale but close to known facts.