It seems fitting that Bright Star, director Jane Campion’s luminous comeback film about the doomed romance between poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, opens with a closeup of a needle moving in and out, in and out of a piece of cloth.
Sewing is one of the things that sustained Campion, 55, the only woman director to win the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d’Or (for The Piano) and one of only three ever nominated for a directing Oscar, when she took a hiatus from filmmaking after devastating reviews for her film In the Cut. “My daughter was concerned that I wouldn’t know how to look after her, so she gave me a task to make this creature that she drew for me,” says Campion, whose daughter Alice is now 16. Campion’s hand-sewing passed that test, and she went on to embroider Alice a series of pillowcases. She also became a passionate collector of antique handmade tablecloths.
“The work on these tablecloths is very humble and beautiful to me, because it’s taken hours and hours and there’s no recompense for the women who made them, nobody gives a damn,” Campion says. “It’s such a metaphor for women’s lives.”
Jane Austen-era fashionista and expert seamstress Fanny Brawne, played by Abbie Cornish, is the central character of Bright Star, the sun to the dying Keats’s pale moon. The film is a gorgeous and meditative period piece, as opposed to a gritty thriller like In the Cut. “When I took my time out,” explains Campion, “I discovered that what moved me was not the attention-grabbing stuff, but tenderness.”
The excitement Campion felt about the story of Brawne’s and Keats’ doomed romance—she also wrote the screenplay—is what drove her back to work after four years at home. “When you feel that energy around an idea, you know it’s good and nobody in the world can tell you it’s the wrong thing to do.”
She says she's better at coping with the critics now than when she was younger. “I’ve been around a few times and I know how to look out for myself better. I have a yoga practice I do every day. Keeping your sanity makes a lot of difference.
