When I walked out of the theatre, I felt other than before. Autumn cool, ground wet but not raining, and overcast, there was a certain lightness of mind, of decluttering, a scrubbing. Each step seemed a thing in and of itself, like the riding of a horse, a palpable sense of separation between the walking and the walker. Also the looking, as if through different eyes; occasioned of an equanimity tinged in fear, of something good, right, justified yet fleeting. Breath, too, the breath of morning in midday, a gentle rising and falling to match the gait.
How does one describe the indescribable. To be changed and to know of the changing, a realignment, a tectonic shifting of soul and mind and even body--a lightness such as the unshouldering of a heavy coat, where everything, every step, lifts again in peaceful joy, neither frown nor smile burdened. And above all, a calm, the kind after a long, hard cry, when resistance gives way, is released into the wind, carried somewhere, away.
I could write of the movie, the score, the acting, the cinematography. But everything I would say would pale the art as words always dilute their object. But I will say this, there are moments, devastating moments, when what is real and what is affected become confused, where one loses the sense of stage and in its place, a witnessing. Of what, I'm not sure. Yet, one knows upon the moment, of something other.
This movie is not like other movies. I can think of no higher praise.
______
Update: 10.14.09
Watched Bright Star again. On the first view, there were two facets flawed I thought: a bit slow at times and a bit blocky. As I sat before the second viewing, I anticipated an exaggeration such that the movie would seem interminably long and blocky and that I risked everything I had experienced on the first view, including the tears still not unfelt.
Two hours later, walking again into a gray afternoon, the feelings of before were as they were, only deeper. Where before there was the slowness, on second viewing, a sense that everything was moving too fast; and where before there was the gap between scenes, on second viewing I discovered a fading, a melting, an emotional thread weaved such to make one flower within a field blend to color the entire landscape whole. And the tears I feared would fall not upon the artifice of actor viewed not quite thrice, I found instead the well contained more water than the eye could bear.
And here is what is insane. I would gladly go again, tonight, to pay and to watch, again.
26 comments:
You've been waiting and waiting for it! I troubled me to wade through all the shlocky movie listings and have to really dig to find a showing of the quality one. Sounds like I should be prepared to come out of that theater a changed woman. That's not a bad thing.
yes, i am back and i think, if you don't mind, i 'd love to follow you for a bit.. the movie.. I am looking forward to seeing this one.. I've enjoyed this actor in the movie Perfume (did you see it??)
Liane, I am always humbled and honored with visitors and commenters. I live for the interaction. So, in other words, I don't mind at all.
I haven't seen Perfume. Ben is a wonderful Keats, although in this movie, the axis spins around Fanny.
Limes, I almost wrote nothing of the movie. Reviews and opinions can be so subjective and in this way, misleading. My experience of the movie (I cried through most of it), probably will not be your experience. I really believe we see the world as we are, not as it is and so in this regard, our experiences are really our own. If you like art, you will like this movie. If you can go to a museum and be happy to stay there all day, you will love this movie. It is as if postcards and letters were captured on film.
Looking forward to it tremendously. Already figured out I'd weep until there wasn't anything left to weep. I like how you approached not coloring it for anyone else. Let us do that ourselves. Can't wait.
Thank you! I hadn't heard of this movie but I shall definitely put it on my list of to do!
Gray, I can't recall a movie I've paid to see twice. Maybe Saving Private Ryan. I'll see this one again next week.
This is perfect. Perfect. Next week I'm travelling and will find myself alone in a strange place. I'll put on something cozy, layered, long armed, and pull myself up into a chair like a waiting punctuation mark. Not sure what. Surely not exclamation, never period, sometimes semi-colon, often question mark, probably mercurial comma. I'll open myself up and let whatever happen happen. Perfect. Perfect.
"I really believe we see the world as we are, not as it is." Me, too.
I fully expect to be wide eyed one moment and sobbing the next.
xo
erin
If this movie is nearly as affecting as your written impression of it, it will be worth it. How you were moved by it is itself a deeply affecting moving-image, for me.
How true that we see the world as we are! I now look forward to seeing Private Ryan, too. I admit to not seeking out 'war movies.'
Constance, I'm not sure you'd like SPR. The opening scene, D-day, is horrific. Tom Hanks is very good and the general message is one to take home, but it is a war movie and there are scenes that once seen will haunt you for a long, long time.
As for Bright Star, the movie has been like soup, which is to say, in the last two days, it has grown in my mind, taken hold of some part of me. I'm not sure why. What is interesting for me is I identify with all three main characters. And the tragedy, for all. I've always identified with tragedy and this movie is brimmed with it.
Erin, I hope you like it as much as I did. Would love to hear your thoughts, yea or nay.
Your reaction to the movie and your beautiful writing about it compels me to tell you there is a contest on the website at brightstar-movie.com. Best love letter and best love tweet with prizes from A Diamond is Forever and Montblanc.
Your "review" of the film is like a love letter to the film.
Anon, I did fall for the film. Here are some random reasons:
(1) the film is beautifully 'under' scored (that is, less music than one would think; this allows space for (2), the wonderful 'under' dialogue--which is to say, for a film with no 'action' there is also a minimal amount of gibberish.
(3) when taken with the above, space is opened for expression to take center stage; this works, can only work, if you have actors who can rise to the occasion--in this movie, you do
(4) Abbie Cornish may not win an Oscar, but she should--I was not familiar with her work and skeptical she could do what needed to be done--I was wrong
(5) the movie is like a series of letters, snapshots where one does not necessarily flow into the other and the feeling is of walking in a museum and moving between exhibits
(6) I've seen the contest. I have neither the talent nor skill to do justice but I do appreciate you mentioning it here for I do have some readers who could do a wonderful job
Trée, thanks for the heads-up on SPR. I am watchful about my mental-emotional diet. Not to live in la-la land (tho it's just down the mountain!)but because of consequences.
A friend calls the deep connection with a character -- in cinema or in life -- being 'caught by an archetype.'
The Gemini diamond has many, many facets to polish, to receive light, to reflect light. Oh so many! Life will never be long enough! Whenever I am 'caught by an archetype' like a little fly in a web, it shakes the whole life to the marrow. For a while, I am eaten...
There is a god, a timeless myth, a symbol in every one of these usually sudden life-ambushes. I too can't wait to see this movie!
Constance, two things: (1) lower your expectations--this is a movie that opens the imagination, but you must fill in meaning. I can imagine a lot of people walking out feeling the movie was about nothing, moved too slow, was boring, perhaps disjointed. (2) let me know what you think after you see it--I have a feeling you're going to like it.
Your comments about the film reinforce the Keats aesthetic of "Negative capability" about which he said "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reason". I think that is what Ms. Campion accomplished with this film. I stumbled upon the UK website brightstarthemovie.com and there are some delicious notes and images there. I loved Ms. Campion's notes to her apprentice director and so much more.
Anon, that is a wonderful sight and a touching look behind the scenes.
I like the way you have described the movie via Keat's poetic philosophy. Jane has created a work that allows the viewer the opportunity to pour themselves into the film, the milieu, to inhabit the age, the times, by mostly, the emotional landscape. Nothing in this movie hits you over the head, dictates or preaches. Everything is open, allowing the audience to breathe themselves into the characters, to become the emotions and to see poetry in the art of Jane's work, the images, the pacing so on and so forth. As Keats says in the film, to luxuriate in the lake, not to work it out, or swim to shore, but something beyond.
Having been weaned on French and European cinema, what makes the GP (general public) stay away in droves is exactly what brings me in. A discrete or randomly absent musical score. Some decent movies have been totally ruined by music instructing viewer how to feel, or announcing what's in the next scene.
Trusting the audience. The opennes you describe. I loved The Piano. I'm not reading comments closely because the best ingredient is seeing a film 'cold' -- little or no advance anything, positive or negative. Probably go tomorrow. Wonderful to find kinshhip in the true art of film here.
Constance, I eagerly await your review.
Trée, I saw it yesterday and was very pleased and touched deeply. I agree with your thoughts in that it was beautifully understated, to use a generalization. It really allowed the watcher to become more involved I thought because we had to participate and not just be told how to feel via grandiose music and visual cues. And I truly love the economy of the dialog.
There are moments (pictures) that are burned into my memory. They were just so stunning yet real. Her laying on her bed as the breeze blows the curtain, her laying in the field of lavendar, him sitting under the tree writing, the laundry blowing on the line... not the big moments but the lovely almost spiritual moments. Heaven.
I did not cry during but after. I cried because I was moved by his poetry and the shear beauty of the film. I cried because I could feel their love and loss. And finally I cried for my love and my loss.
Thank you for your observations.
DH, thanks for sharing. I too have many moments branded into my memory, moments, like yours, that from the outside would seem to be nothing, yet, somehow, they are not nothing but something beyond my ability to explain or even understand. I just know there is some profound beauty in those scenes, those moments, that reach places dark and shedding light and in the light a release and from that release a lightness and clarity not there before. The experience is to the soul as the rain released is to the air--a cleansing, a freshness as if breathing for the first time.
My fear in writing of my reaction was that no one else would see or feel what I did and I would look like a sentimental fool, which is not to say I'm not. :-D
And the poetry really does come to life when it is read and received. That she is able to do this, that there is this interchange, this sharing, of genius unfolding in his magical year, a year of creation, or sublime production unlike any poet we have seen, as if one could play Wimbledon back to back six months in a row and win each time. No one can say what he may or may not have produced if he had lived--perhaps nothing more of consequence, but the year 1819 will forever be an unfolding of magnitude not yet seen since.
A small wild bird sings in the highest branch of the tree, calling, calling for his flock, his kin, his mate. The most beautiful, delicate song in the world, he trills to the brink of exhaustion. His Beloved wings to his side, recognizing his song at last. It is her song, too.
The poet is a wild lost bird who cannot bear the world for but two and a half short decades. He does not die "prematurely." He drops his earthly wings right on time as we all do, but seemingly sooner, for he is so young. His true world is Elsewhere, and Other.
A movie re-enacting actual events is a thin veil behind which the real events play in my imagination, many times stronger than on the screen. It is not a viewing but a visceral experience. I had it with Titanic, with Schindlers List and with Bright Star today. Had Keats and Franny been fictitious, I would have been distracted by the too-perfect skin, good hair, modern gaits, and other incongruencies. But Keats did live and continues to live.
The essence of the film was Keat's poetry and I hungered for more. The long recitation at the very end filled my heart to the brim. Divine words that practically eclipsed the film itself, except when they were close to matched by the soul-union gazes of the lovers. I was unprepared for how their parting and his death would affect a recent loss of my own. So, dear Trée, I came home with the heart of lead and not of lightness after a good cry, alas!
Emerging from the theater into a parking lot, artificiality seemed to animate a mechanical world - cars, concrete buildings, coiffed tourists in shorts. My inner-Franny keened and grieved all the way back up the mountain.
My favorite character was Mr Brown, the magnificently relentless p.i.t.a. scoundrel! Oh the pain of breaking out of ignorance. He brings me back to present time, at the viewing and now.
"The heart by its nature is soft and open; what breaks is its protective shell." (D. Richo)
Constance, thanks for sharing. Since I've seen the movie I've been re-reading Stanley Plumly's magnificent meditation on Keats: Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography--highly recommended if you want to explore his last years, if you want to know what what it is like to read of one poet's love of another. Plumly has spent more time studying Keats than Keats was alive. This love shines in every paragraph.
I'm not sure where the lightness I experienced came from. Tragedy aside, perhaps it was the witnessing of something so unadulterated. As Keats wrote to Brawne, a concentration of all the senses. An intensity rarely seen, experienced. As if to live but those three days, fully, to be more than fifty common years.
As for leaving the theater, I suppose I was fortunate in that I saw a matinee, on a weekday. There were only a handful of people in the parking lot, as there were only a few in the theater. I walked back to my car not seeing another soul, sound muted in remembrance of those last scenes. It did feel to me as a washing, as if I'd been cleansed of something--of what, I still can't say, but I could have gotten in my car and just driven and driven. The thought actually crossed my mind as if I could live in the memory of the film, of the life imagined, lived like they were bread and water. And be as mistletoe, rootless, carried on the wind from branch to branch, parasitic to myself.
Reading Keats, of his life, is a very dangerous thing for me. I felt it the first time I read Plumly's account, of which once finished, I recovered, but upon the second reading, I feel myself slipping again into that horrid place of a life that reflects a little too much of what I don't want to see in myself. Still, I agree about the reading of Ode to a Nightingale as the credits roll. I've read the poem, more than once, but never did it have the impact it did as Ben read it, as if I were hearing it for the first time, as if it took flight and lived in some way it had never lived when I read it with my own eyes. One of the mysteries of poetry is how it must be given voice to come alive, that the reading aloud is like adding water to the seed and soil and what becomes is something other than before. Those moments when the music fades and it is just his voice, well, the price of the soundtrack I would pay just for those moments--such as when he utters the word forlorn, with the music just dropping away and there is just his voice.
Your every word an ever-opening lotus, fractal, poem, from the center... beautiful!...meanwhile the river flows on at DT - shall I stay here or catch up? or end on a more mundane note about the joys of getting into one's car and driving, driving ... "as mistletoe, rootless, carried on the wind from branch to branch, parasitic to myself"?
This is awesome, your entire posting; and mundane does not exist.
Constance, go to the current post. It is my love letter, of Kyra to Papa.
I don't know who you are, but you are a wonderful writer. You really captured the feeling I had as I exited the theatre. Thank you!
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