“I like men and I like women,” said Jane Campion at yesterday’s LFF press conference for Bright Star. “I’m interested in the individual.”
The acclaimed writer-director was not divulging anything as intimate as her bisexuality. She was instead evading one journalist’s request that she comment upon the ostensible feminist concerns of her acclaimed body of work. That Bright Star pays far greater attention to the consciousness of John Keats’ eighteen-year-old first love, Fanny Brawne, than to the poet himself is justification enough for an interrogation along these lines. That it is also impossible to name a single Campion film that has not priviliged the life of the female mind – and heart – over that of the male gives that journalist’s question the shape of an imperative.
And yet, historically, Campion has resisted engagement when pressed on the gender politics of an oeuvre which critics and academics alike have invariably identified as palpably gendered. At the Toronto Film Festival in 2003, she again retreated from the feminist themes of her art horror picture, In the Cut, sidestepping the probings with a curt description of the film as a meditation on the ‘Western romantic myth’. Apparently the castration anxiety propelling the violent narrative, which not-so-incidentally finds its prefigurement in the mutilation of Ada’s hand in The Piano, did not merit discussion. Why, we might ask, so shy?
Of course, a simplistic insistence that a female director discuss the feminist currents of her work employs a dangerous essentialism, and makes the assumption of a collective filmic identity based on sexual difference alone. But to question a director whose aesthetic is rich with feminist references and feminine textures is not to reduce her to her gender, but to celebrate the rare expression of those things in an artistic medium where they are otherwise marginalised.
Bright Star is fascinating precisely because the subjectivity which carries us through the film does not belong to the male poet whose life and death have eclipsed it. As Campion herself emphasised during the press conference, there are only two scenes in the film where the spectator is given the chance to depart from Fanny’s point of view. True to form, she refuses to elaborate.
