
I saw Bright Star the other night. It’s a wonderfully poetic film about the doomed love between a sickly poet and his muse. Fittingly, it is cinematic poetry, full of complex imagery (a sealed bedroom full of butterflies, a handsome young man reclining on the top of a tree canopy staring at the sky, an extreme close up of a needle being threaded and pulled through cloth), the kind of imagery that strikes you immediately because maybe you haven’t seen it before, but also stays with you, their multiple meanings revealing themselves as you dwell on them in the context of the film. It made me wish Jane Campion would make more films.
But as for the title of this post.
I saw this in a multiplex in my Upper West Side neighborhood. I was stunned that no one left during the end credits. Why? Because Ben Whishaw, who plays John Keats, reads Ode to a Nightingale! I would have thought that would have sent the audience out en masse.
Apparently I don’t know my neighbors too well.