Critics reviews

For a director whose films have so often explored masochism and perverse love of both the romantic and familial variety, Bright Star feels like an outlier. There is such purity and aching tenderness to the film.

Natural beauty was one of Keats’ strongest inspirations, and it’s clear that Campion took this to heart. The spring love sequences are some of the closest scenes I’ve seen on film to accurately capturing the sensation of being totally blissed out.

The film stitches together world and wonder, the sharp needle and rough thread that yield the clothing worn on the body melding with the ethereal words of a poet. The film is a tribute to the powerful tension between the two, between materiality and mystery, soul and body, practicality and poetry, even life and death, and of course, between male and female.

Acutely aware of the inherent power of the raw image, and trusting in the material prior to its contextualisation, Campion artistically reveals the importance of sensation in the "unadorned image"... Campion's directorial approach when filming Bright Star, her responsiveness to that which is becoming and attuned to changing sensations in the creative process, invited a dialogue with the spectator and "reality" that echoes André Bazin's conception of the "world in its own image".

Both young lovers speak and move freely through the charmed time they spend together. BRIGHT STAR's world and language are plausible, but more than that they are intoxicating. When the final letter inevitably arrives, Fanny's loud, desolate sobs shake you awake and give you a real moment of grief.

[Bright Star] is a film relatively uninterested in gender or sexual politics, and intensely interested in the nature of art... As someone trained in painting and experienced as a writer, [Campion] shows us here the beautiful sanctuaries that word and image create together, and the reasons why life requires us—like Fanny—to abandon them.

Campion has made a fine and even ennobling film: defiantly, unfashionably about the vocation of romantic love... [Bright Star] is almost certainly the best of Campion’s career, exposing The Piano as overrated and overegged.

Campion’s pacing is immaculate, and her mixing of light and shade is so subtly effective that, as the tale heads towards inevitable tragedy, it’s impossible not to be left both quietly devastated and thoroughly uplifted.

It's to Campion's credit that she doesn't heat up the story or go for easy emotional payoffs, and we're spared even the pathetic deathbed scene that another director might have felt necessary... 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.

“Bright Star” could easily have become a dark, simple fable of repression, since modern audiences like nothing better than to be assured that our social order is freer and more enlightened than any that came before. But Fanny and Keats are modern too... [and] Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense; her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.

A period film and a biopic that thankfully never feels a typical example of either genre, [Bright Star] is a welcome return to form for Campion... She somehow evokes the aching, giddy intoxication of an impossible love affair, and employs audacious devices to do it.

While avoiding the typical biopic template, the film nonetheless honors the facts of the central relationship, which means some typical, central audience expectations concerning emotional payoff aren’t met.