Bright Star Revisited

Watched Bright Star with my mom last night. Her first viewing. My fourth full viewing, which is to say, since I got the DVD, I've watched individual scenes multiple times. I'm not one to watch a movie more than once and I can count of two hands the number of movies I've watched twice, none of which was nearly as good as the first viewing. Bright Star, however, for reasons I can only guess, remains for me a deeply moving personal experience and the fourth viewing was as wonderful as the first three and the emotions again flowed as they did on the earlier viewings. It is as if within me a wound that this movie touches as nothing else is or has been able to reach and with each viewing, a bleeding fresh of my own past, my own longing, of knowing first hand of what I see on the screen and knowing I've never seen it captured better. The acting seems, to my heart, not acting. And the looks exchanged between John/Ben and Fanny/Abbie seemed not to belong to the art of movie making but of something other, as if what was captured was something greater than just a story or acting. When you watch this movie, pay special attention to how they look at each other and in particular, how Abbie looks at Ben, and if you can tell where the line is between the craft and love, you have better eyes than I.