Celebrating women

Director Jane Campion, 55, the only woman ever to have won the Palm d’Or award at Cannes for her movie The Piano, is returning to the French film capital with her latest, Bright Star, a film which portrays the love affair between Romantic poet John Keats and teenager Fanny Brawne. New York Times reporter Joan Dupont writes that “this 19th-century romance resonates: at the end of the screening, there were few dry eyes.” Campion, who wrote the script, has made a sensual film, setting the young lovers in their period and landscape. The Brawne family is the center of a buzzing household opening on Hampstead Heath: butterflies enter windows, bat their wings, and die by night. These details — fields of bright flowers, children’s hectic play — bring the lovers into focus. “I didn’t want to make a biopic, but rather a voyage to show these people in their daily intimacy.” Campion’s heroines are resilient. Holly Hunter played the mute, isolated woman in The Piano, and Nicole Kidman portrayed Isabel Archer, who paid for her independent spirit, in Portrait of a Lady, Campion’s adaption of the Henry James novel. “You could say that Fanny is a subtle version of the same idea,” she said. “In some ways she did go against what her mother wanted: she went with her heart.” New Zealand actress Kerry Fox plays Fanny Brawne’s mother in the film.