Jane Campion, Where Have You Been?

A scene from Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” Image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.

“You have to develop a tough skin (to be a director) and it’s my suspicion that women aren’t used to that,” Campion offered. Concluding the thought and smiling, she said, “They must put on their coats of armour and get on with it, because we need them.”

Campion’s new film looks at the intense, secret romance that develops between next-door neighbors Brawne and Keats. The twenty-something writer wrote his love poem “Bright Star” for the teenaged fashion maven.

Set during a range of seasons, bright colors and fields of Spring flowers are contrasted with the stark white landscape of snowy winter, providing a striking backdrop for the burgeoning, at times melodramatic young love story in the beautifully executed “Bright Star.”

A word of warning from the filmmaker, however: Don’t call it a bio-pic.

“This is not a bio pic, it’s a story inspired by their own story, told from Fanny’s point of view and it’s a love story using the material and the letters,” Campion cautioned, rather emphatically. “I find the bio-pic frustrating because it doesn’t give you room to have the space and the details really, so I don’t think this is a bio-pic.”

“Bright Star” begins with an extreme close-up of the threading of a needle. Fanny Brawne was a student of fashion seen creating lavish costumes for herself and her family. “Almost all women sewed,” Campion noted this morning, “They sewed, and they waited.” So that was the filmmaker’s window into the story.

“There’s so many ways to tell the story and talk about Keats,” Camption noted, “This is just one way, it’s my inspiration. I tell it through Fanny and the sewing is a kind of meditative part of it.”

Abby Cornish, who plays Fanny Brawne in “Bright Star,” added, “The sewing is the thread of the film, from beginning to end.”