GIRL IN A SUICIDAL LANDSCAPE

'Will is mysteriously absent. I can only assume he’s reacted badly to your defection to Brendan and thrown himself down a ravine.'

'Well, the next time we make inappropriate purchases with other people’s money I want you to stop mixing poisonous mushrooms in your wine, it’s not doing your memory or sensibilities any favours.'

I hardly ever frequent mainstream cinema, primarily because I don’t like new releases especially ones that set out to chronicle the life of someone I respect and admire. Thus going to see ‘Bright Star’, a film about the elegiac potentate of lovelorn verse John Keats, was an enterprise doomed from the start. While I have always been aware of Keats I only read about his life a couple of years ago and what I’d learned inevitably led me to conclude that Keats had been afflicted with some sort of morbid chronobiological disorder. Having spent most of his life obsessively fixated with the idea of death, Keats' tragic poverty-stricken end arrived at the vernal age of 25. He passed away in a foreign land, torn from the woman he loved, believing he had left no footprint in the world. The film, 'Bright Star', bearing the name of one of Keats' poems, reconstructs the last three years of the poet's life.

And like Aristotle’s theory of tragedy it relies on climatic procession of dramatic events that have claim upon universal trappings namely those of love, loss and thwarted happiness so in that respect, and every other, it is a story unremarkable in any particular except a haphazardly assembled cast and all the elements of a mawkish BBC period drama. Jane Campion forgets to explore the spiritual dimensions of the two people at the cynosure of the story, not only that she overlooks the essence of it in favour of more mundane details such as Keats' struggle to succeed, Fanny's obsessive following of fashion and Mr Brown's over-laboured laments over the couples budding romance. What's more, the ill-fated lovers make an ill-match. There is no chemistry between them whatsoever in fact there's more of it between Miss Browne and Mr Brown. Ben Whishaw's Keats is reduced to a gormless, rawboned, coughing daydreamer. While Abbie Cornish, her flaxen tresses a modest brown and her face puritanically achromatic, assumes the role of his beloved with maladroit refinement and little conviction. The film leaps in to tedium from the first ten minutes onwards as Campion relays her vision with a cloying reverence for romance and all the ineptitude of a provincial matchmaker.

Essentially the film lacks passion which is so clearly evident in Keats' epistles to his beloved, and his immediate circle of friends. Had Campion bothered to research her subject she would have perhaps picked up on the fact that Fanny Brawne both confused and exasperated Keats as much as she enthralled him. Keats wrote to his brother George on the subject: 'Shall I give you Miss Brawne? She is about my height with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort - she wants sentiment in every feature - she manages to make her hair look well - her nostrils are fine though a little painful - her mouth is bad and good - her Profile is better than her full-face which indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any bone - her shape is very graceful and so are her movements - Her arms are good her hands badish - her feet tolerable.... She is not seventeen - but she is ignorant - monstrous in her behavior flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx - this I think not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it.'

But of course he could not decline. It was already too late. And in turn Keats became a new man one who had previously declared that any creature in love 'cuts the sorryest figure in the world' to someone for whom 'love' became a 'religion' and a thing so sacrosanct he was ready and willing to 'die' for it. Campion doesn't document this transition, nor its impact on Keats' work, which should not be underestimated, as it was during this particular period of his life that Keats matured and developed his craft. Love proved an impetus and an inspiration without which he would have had nothing to brood over. Campion however curtails the passion to a simple case of two people thrown together by proximity and convenience and therein their vested interest in one another seems staged and superficial.

But really, everything about Jane Campion's endeavour to enlighten the laymen about one of the most influential Romantic poets reinforces the popular misconceptions about poetry and its forefathers. There's something jejune, even juvenile, about her Keats. His jealousies, fancies and general traits resemble those of a capricious and mumbling infant while Abbie Cornish can't quite project a coquettish or facile enough Miss Browne and thus there is a monumental discord between the two characters which creates an impression of them both being completely out of sync. Every aspect of the film is genuinely mediocre, and typical of its genre, which is ironic seeing as the story was anything but. Again, Campion's oversight of small yet crucial details, all of which are documented in Keats' surviving letters, shows a rather slack attitude on her behalf. More importantly, however, I resent Campion for failing to explore and thereby portray the story with any depth or intelligence and furthermore boring me more than any one of Jane Austen's assaults on literature courtesy of the BBC. In short, 'Bright Star' is neither bright nor deserving of any stars. But Keats still rules!

'I trust my little piranha is having an enjoyable day.'

My mate, Ian Brown, swaggering down Bayswater road in a pair of red-black-and-white trainers.