One of the reasons for the decision to relive my previous experience through Sky Cinematic films was their inclusion of a separate channel for Independent films and I experience two with the first 24 hours.
I did not enjoy the much acclaimed Rachel Getting Married because it covers the familiar ground of what can happen when the individuals within a family come together for weddings, funerals and annual celebrations. There is always the disappointment of expectation, someone becomes emotionally upset, long held grievances boil over and spoil what is intended as an opportunity to enjoy and event or mark a life in a secure environment. Of course not every occasion follows such a pattern within one extended family network or between family networks. Showing what can go wrong can also be funny or painful. There was something not real, fabricated, artificial about this film although I accept it was my projection and others will have viewed the experience differently
The setting for Jonathan Demme‘s 2008 drama also infuriated because it is so atypical for contemporary society, a wealthy educated middle class family living in a large house in grounds with hordes of 20 something friends who include lots of musicians, dancers, singers and where there is no tension in the getting together of black and white families. Race and skin colour are not issues in this situation where the two sets of families and friends appear to be part of the same culture. How typical is this of contemporary ghettofied USA.
The story is of Kym who has spent several years in crisis drink addiction, depressed and self destructive having killed her young brother when driving under the influence of drugs and unable to release him from the child’s car seat after taking the vehicle into a lake. She does not appear to have prosecuted and imprisoned for in effect what was manslaughter. She rightly turns on her mother at one point for having left the boy in her care knowing she had been in such a teenage mess. The film does not reveal why she was in such a mess but concentrates on how her release from rehabilitation effectively destroys the marriage day of her elder sister.
Kym has developed into one of those self centred sorry for yourself individuals who utter the classic line you do not understand how I feel when in fact most of us now do. The fundamental flaw of the film is to portray the rest of her family as successful normal and even the parental divorce is presented as a normal occurrence.
Apparently the film shot in 33 days has been praised for a bold approach to the exposition of truth and pain and was nominated in the top ten 20 list of several film critics in the USA. The film was written by Jenny Lumet the daughter of Sydney and grand daughter of Lena Horne and the Director is quoted as saying he loved the way Lumet had written the characters as unlovable, as if this is supposed to make up for the experience lacking in entertainment, pleasure, challenge, or thought provoking. It has nothing to commend apart from good acting, but good acting is never enough.
Fortunately the second film proved to be a delight as well as a challenge. Bright Star is the story of the ill fated relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. I did not get the opportunity to enjoy or study the romantic poets Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats until I was in my early 20‘s buying a J M Dent Everyman Library edition of his Poems and the separate volume of his Life and Letters. Like men young men and women in their teens and early twenties before they have experienced the realities of sexual intercourse the concept of beauty is truth and truth is beauty at the conclusion of a Ode to a Grecian Urn is intoxicating stuff and in fairness to Jenny Lumet she has no truck with such nonsense for truth can be a very ugly and unromantic as no doubt Keats experienced as he died away from family and friends, and Fanny on some foreign shore.
The film is brilliantly set recapturing Hampstead as a village in the early 1820’s and reminding of my encounter with the Hampstead and its heath in the 1961 when I briefly befriended the daughter of one of the highly regarded Jewish City of London of that day.
Fanny Brawne was the socially educated daughter of a farmer who died when he was thirty five, leaving his widow with three children of which Fanny was the eldest, with adequate means, but where finding a good marriage for Fanny and her young sister Margaret would become a priority for her mother. In 1818 the family moved into one of a pair of recently built semi detached cottages called Wentworth Place built by Charles Armitage Brown and Charles Wentworth Dilke, both writers and friends with Leigh Hunt whose circle included Byron, Haslitt and Charles Lamb. Keats had moved in with Brown after Dilke had moved out and the budding relationship between Fanny and Keats was vigorously opposed by Brown who regarded Fanny as distracting Keats from his calling, and also opposed by her mother who appreciated that Keats has no means to support himself let alone a wife and family.
Fanny then 18 years is described as being a voracious reader, eager, almost forward in engaging in conversation and having great interest in costume, historical and contemporary. She was introduced to Keats by Dilke, before Brown and Keats moved into the other half of Wentworth Place. Fanny is said to have enjoyed the society of young officers from the Peninsular Wars as well émigrés from France and Spain but according to the film, Bright Star, she immediately took to Keats, especially after his younger brother Tom died of consumption on December 1st of that year.
He wrote to his brother George in America that Fanny was elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange and that she was also ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour flying out in all directions, calling people names to an extent that he describes her as being a Minx.
John Keats lost his father when he was eight years of age, went to live with his maternal grandparents with his brothers and sister after the remarriage of his mother two years later and she in turn died when he was 14 years of age. The outcome was that John was removed from his school and made an apprentice to an apothecary and surgeon, living for three years in an attic above the surgery. In October 1815 he became a student at Guy’s hospital after completing the apprenticeship and quickly gained promotion as a junior house surgeon demonstrating that he had talent and was set on a long and rewarding medical career, if he chose. He did not.
Because there is no autobiography and perhaps because his life was so short it is not immediately evident what drove him to start to write poetry and in particular poetry of a romantic ideal nature. It is possible to speculate the impact of losing both parents, of going to live with grandparents and then an apprentice living on his own at the age of 14 years, and as a reaction to the realities of medicine and surgery in 1810-1815.
It is recorded that the lack of income and the desire to work as a poet full time led him into bouts of depression and although in 1816 in gained his licence to work as an apothecary he advised his guardians on reaching maturity(21 years) that had decided to undertake his ambition. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Although penniless as was his married brother George in early 1818 they commenced a walking tour with Brown of the Lake District, George and his wife going to the USA for a new life from Liverpool and with Keats and Brown going on to Scotland, intending to also go to Ireland but returning when Keats caught a bad cold. It was soon after taking up residence at Wentworth Place that in the early part of 1819 he wrote his well known Odes, including that to the Nightingale. He also published his long work Endymion which did not receive critical acclaim and it is likely that the judgement was being made on the man rather than the work because he had not attended a great public school and moved onto an Oxford or Cambridge college.
Bright Star although written as well as Directed by Jane Campion employed Andrew Motion as a script consultant, biographer of Keats whose work is said to have inspired Jane to make the picture. She does not hide the reality that it is Fanny, with the same name as John’s sister and mother, who attempted to engage his attention and was troubled when he did not respond, although as her mother is said to have explained, “Mr Keats knows he cannot like you, he is no living and no income.” Someone which the mother of the Hampstead young woman I courted in 1961 said to her daughter of me. They were both right of course at their respective times.
It is Brown who sends Fanny a Valentine, said as a jest but this infuriates Keats as well as upsets Fanny and brings them together with the relationship blossoming, when the two men take up residence in the other half of Wentworth, then an isolated property, and the relationship continued to flourish until Brown takes him off to the Isle of Wight to earn money. When they return the relationship ignites again having been fuelled by letters and a secret engagement. Their relationship as an engaged couple was also shortlived.
Keats developed tuberculosis and warned that he would not survive a Winter in the UK friends collected funds to enable him to live in Italy. Fanny wanted to travel with him in whatever capacity was desired. He arrived in Italy in November and took a house close to the Spanish Steps in Rome now a Keats and Byron museum. His death is reported as unpleasant with nothing to relieve the pain. He had written poetry for just six years.
The irony is that his close friend Brown who guarded Keats from the love of Fanny did not travel to Italy to care for him. He had made pregnant Abigail, the Brawne maid who had been offered to do for the two neighbours in addition.
It was six years before Fanny cast aside her grief and mourning clothing, but this was shortlived as first her young brother died from consumption aged twenty three and then a year later, her mother whose dress caught fire while leading a guest across the garden by candlelight. Fanny who had been good at languages as well as dress making, now a woman of some means when to live across the channel in Boulogne where twelve years after the death of Keats she married Louis Lindon with whom she bore three children, the third, a daughter after moving to Heidelberg in 1844. Aged 65 and shortly before her death she told her children about her relationship with Keats giving them the letters and other mementoes from her friendship saying that someday they could be considered of value.
The letters were published after which the originals were sold at auction for just under £550. Critics were not impressed believing that Keats had escaped a relationship which would have adversely affected his work.
It was close on 100years before this assessment and judgement was revaluated following the disclosure and publication of letters between Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats. John Middleton Murray in particular recanted in public criticisms written twenty five years earlier saying, I have the deep satisfaction of being able to recant the harsh judgement I then passed on her. In 1993 she was described as a paragon among women, unsentimental, clear sighted, frank, inquisitive, animated, kind and invigorating. It is Keats who was fickle torn between his feelings and his art, although under the strong influence of Brown and mindful of his poverty and lack of means to support a wife. She also revaluated and downgraded her feelings and regard for Keats as she gained maturity and financial independence before her marriage and a family of her own.
Thus as I have found an reminding of the work of Sophie Calle we all revaluate our previous experience through time as we layer new or additional experiences upon what has gone before, just as others revaluate with additional information and from the different perspective of their vantage points of experience and contemporary environment.
I did not enjoy the much acclaimed Rachel Getting Married because it covers the familiar ground of what can happen when the individuals within a family come together for weddings, funerals and annual celebrations. There is always the disappointment of expectation, someone becomes emotionally upset, long held grievances boil over and spoil what is intended as an opportunity to enjoy and event or mark a life in a secure environment. Of course not every occasion follows such a pattern within one extended family network or between family networks. Showing what can go wrong can also be funny or painful. There was something not real, fabricated, artificial about this film although I accept it was my projection and others will have viewed the experience differently
The setting for Jonathan Demme‘s 2008 drama also infuriated because it is so atypical for contemporary society, a wealthy educated middle class family living in a large house in grounds with hordes of 20 something friends who include lots of musicians, dancers, singers and where there is no tension in the getting together of black and white families. Race and skin colour are not issues in this situation where the two sets of families and friends appear to be part of the same culture. How typical is this of contemporary ghettofied USA.
The story is of Kym who has spent several years in crisis drink addiction, depressed and self destructive having killed her young brother when driving under the influence of drugs and unable to release him from the child’s car seat after taking the vehicle into a lake. She does not appear to have prosecuted and imprisoned for in effect what was manslaughter. She rightly turns on her mother at one point for having left the boy in her care knowing she had been in such a teenage mess. The film does not reveal why she was in such a mess but concentrates on how her release from rehabilitation effectively destroys the marriage day of her elder sister.
Kym has developed into one of those self centred sorry for yourself individuals who utter the classic line you do not understand how I feel when in fact most of us now do. The fundamental flaw of the film is to portray the rest of her family as successful normal and even the parental divorce is presented as a normal occurrence.
Apparently the film shot in 33 days has been praised for a bold approach to the exposition of truth and pain and was nominated in the top ten 20 list of several film critics in the USA. The film was written by Jenny Lumet the daughter of Sydney and grand daughter of Lena Horne and the Director is quoted as saying he loved the way Lumet had written the characters as unlovable, as if this is supposed to make up for the experience lacking in entertainment, pleasure, challenge, or thought provoking. It has nothing to commend apart from good acting, but good acting is never enough.
Fortunately the second film proved to be a delight as well as a challenge. Bright Star is the story of the ill fated relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. I did not get the opportunity to enjoy or study the romantic poets Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats until I was in my early 20‘s buying a J M Dent Everyman Library edition of his Poems and the separate volume of his Life and Letters. Like men young men and women in their teens and early twenties before they have experienced the realities of sexual intercourse the concept of beauty is truth and truth is beauty at the conclusion of a Ode to a Grecian Urn is intoxicating stuff and in fairness to Jenny Lumet she has no truck with such nonsense for truth can be a very ugly and unromantic as no doubt Keats experienced as he died away from family and friends, and Fanny on some foreign shore.
The film is brilliantly set recapturing Hampstead as a village in the early 1820’s and reminding of my encounter with the Hampstead and its heath in the 1961 when I briefly befriended the daughter of one of the highly regarded Jewish City of London of that day.
Fanny Brawne was the socially educated daughter of a farmer who died when he was thirty five, leaving his widow with three children of which Fanny was the eldest, with adequate means, but where finding a good marriage for Fanny and her young sister Margaret would become a priority for her mother. In 1818 the family moved into one of a pair of recently built semi detached cottages called Wentworth Place built by Charles Armitage Brown and Charles Wentworth Dilke, both writers and friends with Leigh Hunt whose circle included Byron, Haslitt and Charles Lamb. Keats had moved in with Brown after Dilke had moved out and the budding relationship between Fanny and Keats was vigorously opposed by Brown who regarded Fanny as distracting Keats from his calling, and also opposed by her mother who appreciated that Keats has no means to support himself let alone a wife and family.
Fanny then 18 years is described as being a voracious reader, eager, almost forward in engaging in conversation and having great interest in costume, historical and contemporary. She was introduced to Keats by Dilke, before Brown and Keats moved into the other half of Wentworth Place. Fanny is said to have enjoyed the society of young officers from the Peninsular Wars as well émigrés from France and Spain but according to the film, Bright Star, she immediately took to Keats, especially after his younger brother Tom died of consumption on December 1st of that year.
He wrote to his brother George in America that Fanny was elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange and that she was also ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour flying out in all directions, calling people names to an extent that he describes her as being a Minx.
John Keats lost his father when he was eight years of age, went to live with his maternal grandparents with his brothers and sister after the remarriage of his mother two years later and she in turn died when he was 14 years of age. The outcome was that John was removed from his school and made an apprentice to an apothecary and surgeon, living for three years in an attic above the surgery. In October 1815 he became a student at Guy’s hospital after completing the apprenticeship and quickly gained promotion as a junior house surgeon demonstrating that he had talent and was set on a long and rewarding medical career, if he chose. He did not.
Because there is no autobiography and perhaps because his life was so short it is not immediately evident what drove him to start to write poetry and in particular poetry of a romantic ideal nature. It is possible to speculate the impact of losing both parents, of going to live with grandparents and then an apprentice living on his own at the age of 14 years, and as a reaction to the realities of medicine and surgery in 1810-1815.
It is recorded that the lack of income and the desire to work as a poet full time led him into bouts of depression and although in 1816 in gained his licence to work as an apothecary he advised his guardians on reaching maturity(21 years) that had decided to undertake his ambition. “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Although penniless as was his married brother George in early 1818 they commenced a walking tour with Brown of the Lake District, George and his wife going to the USA for a new life from Liverpool and with Keats and Brown going on to Scotland, intending to also go to Ireland but returning when Keats caught a bad cold. It was soon after taking up residence at Wentworth Place that in the early part of 1819 he wrote his well known Odes, including that to the Nightingale. He also published his long work Endymion which did not receive critical acclaim and it is likely that the judgement was being made on the man rather than the work because he had not attended a great public school and moved onto an Oxford or Cambridge college.
Bright Star although written as well as Directed by Jane Campion employed Andrew Motion as a script consultant, biographer of Keats whose work is said to have inspired Jane to make the picture. She does not hide the reality that it is Fanny, with the same name as John’s sister and mother, who attempted to engage his attention and was troubled when he did not respond, although as her mother is said to have explained, “Mr Keats knows he cannot like you, he is no living and no income.” Someone which the mother of the Hampstead young woman I courted in 1961 said to her daughter of me. They were both right of course at their respective times.
It is Brown who sends Fanny a Valentine, said as a jest but this infuriates Keats as well as upsets Fanny and brings them together with the relationship blossoming, when the two men take up residence in the other half of Wentworth, then an isolated property, and the relationship continued to flourish until Brown takes him off to the Isle of Wight to earn money. When they return the relationship ignites again having been fuelled by letters and a secret engagement. Their relationship as an engaged couple was also shortlived.
Keats developed tuberculosis and warned that he would not survive a Winter in the UK friends collected funds to enable him to live in Italy. Fanny wanted to travel with him in whatever capacity was desired. He arrived in Italy in November and took a house close to the Spanish Steps in Rome now a Keats and Byron museum. His death is reported as unpleasant with nothing to relieve the pain. He had written poetry for just six years.
The irony is that his close friend Brown who guarded Keats from the love of Fanny did not travel to Italy to care for him. He had made pregnant Abigail, the Brawne maid who had been offered to do for the two neighbours in addition.
It was six years before Fanny cast aside her grief and mourning clothing, but this was shortlived as first her young brother died from consumption aged twenty three and then a year later, her mother whose dress caught fire while leading a guest across the garden by candlelight. Fanny who had been good at languages as well as dress making, now a woman of some means when to live across the channel in Boulogne where twelve years after the death of Keats she married Louis Lindon with whom she bore three children, the third, a daughter after moving to Heidelberg in 1844. Aged 65 and shortly before her death she told her children about her relationship with Keats giving them the letters and other mementoes from her friendship saying that someday they could be considered of value.
The letters were published after which the originals were sold at auction for just under £550. Critics were not impressed believing that Keats had escaped a relationship which would have adversely affected his work.
It was close on 100years before this assessment and judgement was revaluated following the disclosure and publication of letters between Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats. John Middleton Murray in particular recanted in public criticisms written twenty five years earlier saying, I have the deep satisfaction of being able to recant the harsh judgement I then passed on her. In 1993 she was described as a paragon among women, unsentimental, clear sighted, frank, inquisitive, animated, kind and invigorating. It is Keats who was fickle torn between his feelings and his art, although under the strong influence of Brown and mindful of his poverty and lack of means to support a wife. She also revaluated and downgraded her feelings and regard for Keats as she gained maturity and financial independence before her marriage and a family of her own.
Thus as I have found an reminding of the work of Sophie Calle we all revaluate our previous experience through time as we layer new or additional experiences upon what has gone before, just as others revaluate with additional information and from the different perspective of their vantage points of experience and contemporary environment.
No comments:
Post a Comment