Deborah Ross

Deprived of emotion

Bright Star<br /> PG, Nationwide

issue 07 November 2009

Bright Star
PG, Nationwide

The most curious thing about Jane Campion’s Bright Star is that I did not cry, even though I was certain I would. I always cry in films. I cry at the drop of a hat. I cry when it only looks as if a hat might drop. I am continually alert for all hat-dropping possibilities. I cried when Rachel returned to Ross in Friends, and that’s an American sitcom. On TV! And this is about the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which began when he was 25 and she was 18, and finished with his death from tuberculosis at 25. This story is sadness itself, and yet I did not cry, unless a very slight welling-up towards the end counts, which I don’t think it does. (According to the National Institute of Welling-Up it was so minor it didn’t even register on its scale.)

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