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On 9/25/10 3:28 AM, Gary MacLennan wrote: > > I didn’t get to see Jane Campion’s film on John Keats. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/2009-movies-wrap-up-part-three/ Bright Star; The Young Victoria These two come from the same studio and represent the PBS Masterpiece Theater aesthetic raised to highest levels of boredom. “Bright Star” is a love story about the poet John Keats and a perfectly ordinary woman named Fanny Brawne who wrote about their affair when she was in her old age. Keats died of TB when he was only 26 years old but produced some of the 19th century’s greatest poems, including the one from which this listless movie derives its title. Directed and written by Jane Campion, who is best known for “The Piano”, it is lovely to look at but totally lacking in drama. It consists mainly of Keats and Brawne in dalliance with each other, like scenes from a Jane Austen novel but without the biting irony. Keats had little to speak of in his life other than his genius with verse, but it is simply impossible for a movie to convey the internal drama that allowed that genius to grow into full flower. So all we end up with is strolls through the garden until a cold rain and a light jacket puts Keats on his deathbed. The director of “The Young Victoria” must have assumed that the audience would be entertained sufficiently by the opulence of Windsor Castle and similar environs and did not take the trouble to secure a decent script before filming. Unlike “The Queen”, the splendid dismantling of Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair, this is an attempt to bolster the image of Queen Victoria, who is represented as a kind of proto-feminist whose marriage to Prince Albert supposedly ushered in a period of social reform that left the working class of Britain as adoring subjects. We are led to believe that Victoria and Albert were locked in battle with powerful Tory politicians who would not be happy until every drop of surplus value was extracted from the workers. Missing from the film is any consideration of Queen Victoria’s role in empire-building, a project that had the effect of robbing Asian and Africans in order to allow the British rich to build their castles and manor houses, while offering some crumbs from the table to the men and women of the British Isles. Julian Fellowes, a life-long Tory and son of a diplomat who has written toothless satires on the aristocracy, wrote the vapid screenplay. The only mystery is why Martin Scorsese helped to produce this valentine to the aristocracy. Perhaps Fellowes caught him in a compromising situation, like a scene out of one of his Mafia movies. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
