Bright Star

Debuting at Cannes Film Festival today: Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion

Jane Campion has the distinction of being the only woman ever to win the Palme d'Or (The Piano), and one of only three women to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director (also The Piano).

From the Cannes Film Festival website—

London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23 year old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of fashion. This unlikely pair started at odds; he thinking her a stylish minx, she unimpressed by literature in general. It was the illness of Keats’s younger brother that drew them together. Keats was touched by Fanny’s efforts to help and agreed to teach her poetry. By the time Fanny’s alarmed mother and Keats’s best friend Brown realised their attachment, the relationship had an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers were swept into powerful new sensations, "I have the feeling as if I were dissolving", Keats wrote to her. Together they rode a wave of romantic obsession that deepened as their troubles mounted. Only Keats’s illness proved insurmountable.

So sad! Time Out London and the London Evening Standard have weighed in so far, and the New York Times ran an article about the film today.