Friday Minute
No. 41 | February 26, 2010

Women Behind the Camera II

Our theme this week
Women directors of notable films from 2009

Featured this week
Monday         —   Anne Fontaine
Tuesday         —   Betty Thomas
Wednesday    —   Agnès Varda
Thursday        —   Nancy Meyers

Featured last week
Monday         —   Lone Scherfig
Tuesday         —   Nora Ephron
Wednesday    —   Claire Denis
Thursday        —   Anne Fletcher
Friday            —   Kathryn Bigelow

Jane Campion

The essentials
Notable 2009 film:  Bright Star; nominated for 1 Oscar; selected to be shown “in competition” at Cannes.

It ought to come like leaves to a tree, or it better not come at all.
—John Keats (Ben Whishaw), on writing poetry, in Bright Star

In his brief life it came to John Keats as it came to few before him or since.  The poet who died young, at the age of 25, expressed doubts whether anything he’d written in his few short years would ever be remembered.  We know better than he knew then.  In time his odes and sonnets entered the canon, and two centuries later his work is taught to schoolchildren, studied by scholars, and recited by lovers of literature.  Keats, today, is one of the immortals of English letters.

Bright Star focuses on Keats’s last years, and especially his love affair with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), the teenage girl next door, whom director Jane Campion sees as a more heroic figure than many of Keats’s biographers do.  Their romance is a story filled with passion, humor, and pain.  The film’s title comes from the first line of a Keats sonnet—”Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art”—about the poet’s desire to be forever with his love.  Jane Campion’s treatment, perhaps in a way, helps fulfill that wish.

Bright Star is just the second feature for Campion this past decade.  Previously she made In the Cut (2003), a thriller with Meg Ryan as a New York City teacher involved with—and suspicious of—a detective investigating a series of murders.  Earlier Campion had adapted Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1995), starring Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer.  Her 1993 film, The Piano, was highly acclaimed.  It starred Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin as mother and daugher in 19th-century New Zealand.  Both won Academy Awards, while Campion herself earned two Oscar nominations, including one for directing (she was only the second woman to be nominated), and a win for original screenplay.  Other honors for the film include a César Award and Palme d’Or (Campion was the first woman to win the Palme d’Or for a feature; she had won at Cannes previously for Peel, a short, in 1986).  The Piano was one of three Independent Spirit Awards won by Campion.  She won the first for her debut feature, Sweetie, in 1989.  Campion was born in New Zealand and lives today in Australia.

Beyond the final credits
Jane Campion says she became acquainted with John Keats while working on an earlier film:  “Meg Ryan’s character in In the Cut is a creative writing teacher.  But that stumped me:  I thought, ‘I just don’t know anything about this.’  On the way to work, she reads the poems pasted up above the seats on the New York subway and I realized I didn’t understand poetry either.  So just to create a diversion and a delay, I picked up a biography of Keats.  That’s where I found the answer; he said he wanted a life of sensations, not thoughts, and I understood that I was trying to photograph sensations.  That came back to me when I was writing Bright Star.”

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Bright Star (2009)
Jane Campion, director

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Interview with Jane Campion and Ben Whishaw

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Final Friday Five, the monthly mini-quiz
1.  Shutter Island is Leonardo DiCaprio’s ___ film directed by Martin Scorsese.
      a.  first
      b.  second
      c.  third
      d.  fourth
      e.  fifth
2.  For the acting duo below, list the movies in which they co-starred in chronological order by release date.
      Jack Lemmon / Walter Matthau
          Out to Sea
          Buddy Buddy
          The Front Page
          The Grass Harp
          The Odd Couple
          Grumpy Old Men
          The Fortune Cookie
3.  The three characters below were portrayed by three of the actors listed to the right.  Name the one actor who did not play the character on film.
      Hannibal Lecter:  Gaspard Ulliel, Anthony Hopkins, James Woods, Brian Cox
      Richard Nixon:  Peter Boyle, Philip Baker Hall, Anthony Hopkins, Frank Langella
      William Bligh:  Trevor Howard, John Mills, Anthony Hopkins, Charles Laughton
4.  For the four films below, select the following four:  release date, director, actor, actress.
      a.  The Big Sleep
      b.  The Long Goodbye
      c.  Farewell, My Lovely
      d.  Murder, My Sweet
      Release dates:  1944, 1975, 1946, 1973
      Directors:  Howard Hawks, Robert Altman, Dick Richards, Edward Dmytryk
      Actors:  Dick Powell, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart
      Actresses:  Claire Trevor, Nina Van Pallandt, Lauren Bacall, Charlotte Rampling
5.  Rearrange the mixed-up titles below to form the names of five films nominated this year for Best Picture.
      a.  Sour Epic
      b.  Hurl the Rocket
      c.  A Nude Action
      d.  A Hip Uniter
      e.  One Samurai

Answers here.

…58…59…60.