A pouring rain greeted journalists as they raced to the Palais on Friday to catch Jane Campion's Bright Star. The gloomy weather was the perfect setting for the somber portrait of the last days of poet John Keats.
It's 1818 London, and the comely seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) has been introduced to the self-hating poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw). She chides poetry but eventually become a poetry student under the watchful eye of the rather unctuous and sickly Keats. So begins a rather flaccid love affair that ends pretty much as expected.
Campion has a great visual eye, especially for period pieces, but script-writing is clearly not her strong suit. Unfortunately Bright Star never manages to convincingly capture the love affair between Brawne and Keats. While they obsessively flirt and toss off bons mots, we never understand what the essence of the attraction is: Keats comes across as vapid and unlovable (at least we know the former isn't true from our English classes), and Brawne's girl-stuck-doing-girl-work-who's-smarter-than-that routine wears thin.
Asking most people their thoughts on the film after the screening, the typical response was, "It's fine": generally the death knell for a film hoping to snag the Palme D'Or. RATING (out of 10): 5