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"  Jane Campion&amp;#039;s Bright Star is such a seductive pleasure that you only fully appreciate her achievement once you&amp;#039;re out from under its spell. Set in the heady pre-Victorian years of the early nineteenth century, it&amp;#039;s the love story of the 18-year-old Fanny Brawne and the romantic poet John Keats, who died of tuberculosis at 25. As played by the superb Ben Whishaw and Abbie \u00ADCornish, Keats and Fanny are deeply sympathetic figures, but they&amp;#039;re never sentimental or morose, and neither is the film. Campion has \u00ADexplored what she calls &amp;quot;the romantic impulse&amp;quot; in five of her seven films, most notably in The Piano (1993), which won three Oscars, including one for her screenplay, and made her the only woman ever to win the Palme d&amp;#039;Or, the Cannes film festival&amp;#039;s top prize. Here she&amp;#039;s interested in the intersection of romance and romanticism, the transforming cultural movement of which Keats, in all his passion and poetic grace, not to mention his fragility, remains an enduring icon. But Campion gives us even more: a taste of a \u00ADvibrant, egalitarian bohemian society two centuries ago and a portrait of family love that is every bit as compelling as the romance at the movie&amp;#039;s center. Named for a great Keats poem inspired by Fanny, Bright Star is a subtle and distinguished piece of work.  The movie opens in 1818, when Keats is 23 and meets the girl next door\u2014literally. They live in adjacent halves of the same Hampstead house: Fanny with her widowed mother, younger brother, and sister; the nearly penniless Keats with the house&amp;#039;s owner, Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), his fellow poet and fierce protector. Lying in bed at night, Fanny listens to Keats moving around on the other side of the wall\u2014an image of secret desire all the more potent for being held at bay. Keats&amp;#039; lack of means makes any future for them impossible, or it would if the colorfully dressed, undereducated yet tart-spoken girl he teasingly calls &amp;quot;Minxtress&amp;quot; weren&amp;#039;t one of Campion&amp;#039;s most gloriously headstrong heroines. Campion&amp;#039;s romantic streak can lead her astray: By the end of The Portrait of a Lady (1996), she&amp;#039;d reduced Henry James&amp;#039; great heroine to a hysterical clich\u00E9. And as much as I admire The Piano&amp;#039;s beauty and sheer oddness, I found the mute heroine&amp;#039;s masochistic embrace of her jungle-dwelling neighbor&amp;#039;s sexual blackmail creepy and unconvincing.   She brings a new and stringent realism to Bright Star that makes the movie far more thrilling by not inviting us to swoon over its thwarted lovers. Never merely pathetic, Keats has a tragic dimension. Campion has called Whishaw &amp;quot;beautiful like a cat,&amp;quot; and he brings a catlike alertness and self-possession to Keats, even in the teeth of the gifted young poet&amp;#039;s onrushing mortality. Cornish, her face noticeably bare and her blond hair darkened and severely pulled back, not only looks like a woman of that time but must generate her glamour from within, and she does. Fanny may not have read all of Milton, as she blandly claims when Brown tries to expose her ignorance, but she has a sharp, forceful mind and a confidence in her own creativity: She thriftily designs and makes her hats and gowns in boldly imaginative styles that only grow more brilliant as the story progresses. Keats and Fanny court the way clever people do, testing and probing with wit and verbal jousts, but the ground they meet on is passion, not just physical but a passion for life and a passionate belief in their own worth. Fanny&amp;#039;s brother, Sam (Thomas Sangster), and droll little sister, Toots (Edie Martin), follow her whenever she leaves the house. Encouraged by their mother, Sam and Toots are like a pair of junior guardian angels, reminding us of something it&amp;#039;s easy to forget about the impressive Fanny\u2014her terrible vulnerability. She&amp;#039;s a young woman in love for the first time, and when her heart shatters as it inevitably must, you hear the heavens wail.  With its embrace of emotion as a source of art and truth instead of a threat to order, and its emphasis on the value of the individual, romanticism broke with the rigid hierarchies of the feudal past: It was the beginning of modernity. In secular society, at least, we are all romantics. Bohemia, that spiritual homeland of artists, writers, and boundary breakers of all kinds, is a fertile place for creativity, not wealth, and Campion&amp;#039;s award-winning young cinematographer, Greig \u00ADFraser, captures the vitality of Keats&amp;#039; and Fanny&amp;#039;s world as well as its plainness. But he also studs the film with gorgeous scenes of nature so startlingly good you could frame them. Like Bright Star itself, they delineate the difference between a pretty picture and a piece of cinematic art. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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