52 Films By Women: Bright Star (2009)

Bright Star

By Andrea Thompson

Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” manages to accomplish quite a bit, not the least of which is a love story where the lovers not only rarely get any time alone together, but fall in love in front of the whole family. It can make passion difficult to find, but “Bright Star” does find it so beautifully. But I much prefer Campion’s criminally underrated 2003 film “In The Cut,” which is a far darker take on not just love, but our concept of it.

Not so with “Bright Star,” which goes all in on the passionate love story between Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw). It kicks off in 1818, during the Regency Era, which gave us one of the most prominent artists of all time in Jane Austen, was about 20 years from giving way to the more romantic, evangelical Victorian Era.

“Bright Star” is certainly reminiscent of Austen in how it keeps the sexual tension at high levels without its heroine engaging in sex. Campion brings on the undertones from the opening, with the most sexual sewing closeup I’ve ever seen, as the camera lingers longingly on the needle as it burst through the thread, with the thread seeming to have a life of its own as its follows, spilling over the fabric like sperm. Am I reading into things? Let’s just say that anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating either clearly hasn’t seen the film or wasn’t paying attention.

Unfilled longing is the cornerstone of many a love story, but in “Bright Star,” a romance that would forever remain unfulfilled, makes pining its beating heart. Even Martin Scorsese had an easier time of it when he proved in “The Age of Innocence” that he knew his way around a bodice-ripper in spite of each and every bodice remaining neatly and exquisitely in place. But his ill-fated romance took place in the heart of a New York high society fully embedded in repressed romanticism.

Bright Star

Not so with Campion’s “Bright Star,” as the romance blooms and dies with nature itself. As Fanny and Keats fall in love, Campion lavishes them with luminous sunlight as Fanny’s body is practically ravaged by the wind and curtains flowing towards her. She even welcomes butterflies into the room, much to the annoyance of her mother. When Keats must depart for London to Fanny’s deep despair, the butterflies perish in the cold that will likewise bring on the tuberculosis that will kill him.

Their love is also somewhat unconventional, even if it contains a multitude of conventions. Like many a daunted lover, Keats is poor; his success and fame came posthumously. It makes him reluctant to become attached to Fanny when he cannot afford to provide the support a husband is supposed to give, so Fanny, who has already developed an interest in him by the time “Bright Star” begins, is the one who pursues him. She makes a point to go out of her way to strike up conversations with him, and even tries to learn about the poetry that is the work of his short life, but which she feels is beyond her grasp. She’s even willing to put up with his friend, fellow poet, and in many ways, his wealthy benefactor, Charles Brown (Paul Schneider in full smarm mode).

Brown is also the far more common type of love interest, with whom Fanny shares the type of charged banter often reveals a sensitive soul underneath. But sometimes a jerk is just a jerk, and in “Bright Star” Brown is the kind of entitled, pretentious jackass who constantly demeans Fanny for her interest in fashion, and her growing connection with Keats, which he believes will ruin him and his chances. His selfishness prevents him from perceiving that love can be a source of strength, even when Fanny inspires Keats to write what would become his most beloved poems, including the sonnet the movie takes its title from. 

Bright Star

Fanny pushes back at Brown’s attempts to demean her in a powerful contrast to the quietly powerful connection she shares with Keats, which is based on mutual respect, and their gradual, serene acceptance that they are unable to live without each other. In a sense, Fanny is both realized and not in “Bright Star.” She is wholly herself without proudly disdaining traditional femininity and the interests that typically accompany it, defending and embracing her passion for designing and making her own clothes. But once she becomes Keats’s muse, Campion allows the love story to overwhelm all other facets of Fanny’s life, which was rich and full.

Then there was the public perception of Fanny, which has greatly shifted over the years, and her friendship with Keats’s sister, also named Fanny, and which is completely absent. It’s not exactly surprising that Campion would want to keep us in thrall to one of the great unfulfilled loves of history, but Fanny also eventually built a life outside of it, and I wish we’d caught a sense of that. I suppose not every movie can be “Wild Nights With Emily,” but some films seem to raise your standards, which, much like a tragic love story, can be both a blessing and a curse.

52 Films By Women: Wild Nights With Emily (2018)

By Andrea Thompson

“Wild Nights With Emily” is meant to evoke laughter and rage in equal measure. Rage against the forces that literally erase history, but also joy and humor for those who manage to contribute to it against all odds. It’s one of those rare films where a director’s perspective also feels like an insider’s view of an invisible, almost parallel history as seen via a great love story, one that happened to be between two women. 

In such a case, calling director Madeleine Olnek a lesbian filmmaker isn’t identity poltics or an unneeded qualifier, it’s an important distinction, since she’s exploring what is in a very real sense her own history, one which she (pretty successfully) argues has been suppressed, despite ample evidence of its existence. She makes her case so well that it’s especially irksome that I can’t help but compare “Wild Nights” to another film about the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, “A Quiet Passion,” even though it came out in 2016, a full two years prior.

Such is the case though, so might as well get the comparisons over with. “A Quiet Passion” was directed by Terence Davies (who is queer himself) and featured a marvelous performance by Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. “Passion” doesn’t reduce the poet to a lovesick woman forever pining after a man by any means, but it does completely ignore the passionate, very sexual relationship Dickinson apparently had with her sister-in-law Susan, instead depicting Dickinson’s life as one dominated by loneliness, celibacy, and hardship. It serves as a kind of time capsule, capturing the sense of a life lived in a very specific time and place, with little to remind us of our own.

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“Wild Nights” doesn’t so much counter such narratives as gleefully kick them to the curb in a fashion that ties our past into how we live now. It begins with a prim and proper narrator stating how there’s been far too much emphasis on Emily Dickinson’s (Molly Shannon) relationship with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler)...as the two women start passionately making out, then fall to the ground, where the rest of their activities, tastefully concealed behind a couch, need no further implications. Just how do such open secrets remain undiscovered? According to Olnek, it’s because the society around them was so damn inept their affair was imaginable. 

This means the men who populate the film, including Emily’s brother Austin (Kevin Seal), who was married to Susan, don’t come off well, but their unthinkingly casual sexism isn’t just pretty damn feasible, it’s familiar. Olnek’s goal is to rewrite the image we have of Emily Dickinson, and she makes a point to thank the sources of the research she uses as her foundation. To Olnek, Emily was that neighborhood weirdo you actually wanted to meet, who gives the neighborhood kids cool treats, and opted out of social gatherings not due to timidity, but lack of interest. She saw the people she wanted to, not those deemed mandatory for the sake of conformity. And because Susan and her family lived right next door, she had easy access to the person she wished to see most.

Perhaps one of the movie’s greatest accomplishments is allowing both women to occasionally be imperfect together, as well as happy. While “Wild Nights” does depict Susan as the kind of intelligent, loving partner we all long for, it also takes pains to portray their relationship as complicated, even prone to bouts of infidelity on Emily’s part at times. But really, when your other half is a talented poet, it’s rather difficult to stay angry. Their bond is also based on equality, with each balancing out the other and providing support, which is sorely needed, given that the male establishment was reluctant to publish Emily, who here is hardworking, ambitious, and eager for publication, rather than the shy, delicate woman who was too timid to show her work to others. 

This is where Mabel (Amy Seimetz) the film’s villain, comes in. As “Wild Nights” tells it, she may be the one who is mostly responsible for Dickinson being published, albeit posthumously, but she accomplished it by essentially creating the image of her that we know today. She was also Austin’s mistress, and both were far less discreet about their affair than Emily and Susan, which had humiliating consequences for not only Susan, but their children. Yet Mabel is also not a one-dimensional villain. She too is ambitious, talented, and creatively stifled, longing for an outlet and constantly rejected by the smiling, condescending men around her. Publishing Emily allowed her to finally display her skills, and she was willing to work within the system to do it. She knew what would sell and what would not, as Susan’s daughter painfully discovered when she tried to correct the narrative being spun about her mother and her aunt to a mostly nonexistent audience.

But the movie also holds Mabel accountable. In Olnek’s eyes, her actions weren’t just a crime, but a kind of murder. For “Wild Nights,” this is the real tragedy, and the film refuses to wallow in Emily’s suffering by showing her decline in the days leading up to her death, saving its anger for how eager people were to rewrite her life before she was even buried. It must have been far easier to give Emily fame once she herself wasn’t around to complicate things by, say, contradicting the publishers who of course supported women’s rights and the need for their voices to be heard, but bemoan how they are “barely able to find any.” In the film’s brutal ending scene, a split-screen hammers the point home, with Mabel preparing Emily’s poetry and letters for publication by literally erasing Susan’s name from them while Susan was bathing Emily’s lifeless body for burial.

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A bit much? Maybe, maybe not. The sound of Mabel’s erasure continues throughout the epilogue, which paints a picture of a truth that is continuing to slowly emerge over the last, oh, 100 years or so, from a time that was simultaneously more risque and constricted than most wanted to acknowledge. Even if Olnek has a few blind spots herself, managing to give Black men a few lines and a bit of a presence while not extending the same courtesy to Black women, she at least doesn’t pretend that our current time is so much better. Even if we’re finally starting to uncover the legacy of those who were never absent in the first place, their invisibility and the accompanying lies continue to endure.